


An Angel Walks Into A Bakery

by Kendrick_Harlow



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bakery and Coffee Shop, Chuck is an Okay Dad, Everyone has their faults, Everyone lives, Family Drama, Gabriel Being Gabriel, Gabriel Lives, Gen, Grudges, Identity Issues, Mental Hospitals, Raphael is Trying, Second Chances, Sibling Bonding, Sibling Rivalry, gabriel is a good bro, minor PTSD, not an au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2018-01-12
Packaged: 2018-12-06 13:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 62,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11602005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kendrick_Harlow/pseuds/Kendrick_Harlow
Summary: Gabriel loves a good punchline, unless that punchline happens to be him and involves more "punch" than strictly necessary.Bringing dead angels back as humans has to be the worst cosmic Dad-joke Gabriel has ever encountered--one he seems to be at the center of.While working at the local bakery, Gabriel stumbles into a number of grudge-wielding siblings. It quickly becomes clear that if the alive-again angels don't work on their family issues, their second chance will end in as much bloodshed as the first.





	1. Ninety-Nine Problems and a Batch Ain’t One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone,
> 
> A little note about how this got started: I became over-invested in coffee shop AUs, then thought it would be funny to make a coffee shop not-AU, which expanded from there. I feel like this honors the Supernatural tradition of taking classic tropes and turning them on their heads.
> 
> The canon goes up to the start of S13. I plan to include a lot of dead angels, 'cause no one's got scores to settle like the dead do. Also, you know, any excuse to bring Gabriel back. Feel free to drop a line.
> 
> Thanks.

Rays of light battered themselves against Gabriel’s eyelids, and he could understand why most humans hated mornings if they felt like this—like the sun had declared war against you personally. Three seconds passed before the smoke of battle cleared. He was hit with vivid realization.

_He wasn’t dead._

Literal alarm bells went off around him at the thought. _Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep!_ He thrashed and tried to escape out of the blindingly white prison he was in. His nose and throat and lungs all ached. He’d heard of rooms like this in Heaven, where disobedient angels were reprogrammed, but had never been in one.

A door slammed open. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, easy there,” said a woman’s soft voice. “You’re in—” Whatever she said next became garbled nonsense. Darkness crept in around his vision until it was all-consuming again.

The terrifying awakening happened three more times, each distorted, and he grew more and more convinced that he was in one of Heaven’s reprogramming rooms. However, on the fourth time, he made out the word “hospital” and relaxed. The nurse explained to him that he’d been in a coma for the last month. Then she told him the date and he grumbled, “ _Monkey balls._ ”

He’d been gone for _years._

They wanted to keep him a few more days for observation. Gabriel tried to poof himself out of there Day 1, only to snap his fingers and get zilch. He had all the grace of a fledgling. His legs shook when he stood and the staff kept rambling about physical therapy. It was common, they said, for muscles to atrophy after a certain amount of time. He would admit, he did feel… _thin_. In checking himself over, he determined that his skin was far closer to his bones than it should have been. The flesh over his abdomen stretched especially tight, and he wasn’t entirely surprised to find a thick scar running through it, exactly where Lucifer had stabbed him through. The doctor took note of it. The doctor took note of a lot of things.

They asked a heaping pile of questions he couldn’t answer and determined he had retrograde amnesia. He must have gotten half of them right by luck because they weren’t too worried. To be honest, it was a relief when the mirror showed him the same face he’d been wearing when he died, even obscured by overgrown facial hair as it was. Finally, something familiar.

When they did finally let him out, they handed him a stack of personal belongings. His license identified him as one Gabriel Angelino—which meant his name was literally Gabriel the Angel. “You’re _sooooo_ funny, Dad,” he mumbled to himself and he ran his fingers along the plastic edge. He looked to the sky. “I guess I have you to thank for bringing me back?” No answer. As per usual.

A little investigating revealed that he lived in Brookings, South Dakota, in Room #208 of a nearby apartment complex, Pearlgate. “Again, sooooo funny.” Although, it was nice to know dear old Dad had his sense of humor back. The apartment was in mild disarray and drowned in wafts of stale cologne; the kind of things that came with being lived-in. Gabriel picked a dark button-up shirt up from over the back of the couch. “Slight mess. Nice touch.” The kitchen table was strewn with documents. He glanced at them, feeling like part of the Scooby Gang searching for clues. “Zoinks,” he muttered upon finding a solid lead. His hospital bills, the next month of his rent, and car insurance had all been paid by one Chuck Shurley. Next to those were a stack of various job openings. He scoffed. “First you pay my bills, then you throw me job openings. What am I, a millennial?”

Still, no angel juice, and Dad was hinting it was going to be that way for a while. Eh. He’d done the whole witness protection thing before. He could handle it.

###

Tabula Rasa Café was short a good baker, and if there was one thing Gabriel could do, it was _sweets._ The air in the small shop itself assaulted new arrivals with cloying sugar clouds, undercut by the dense aroma of fresh coffee. Natural light cut in through the wide windows facing the street, illuminating pale yellow walls and dark wooden tables. It was a mellower kind of brightness than Heaven, whose light had too often shined like an endless spotlight, constantly insisting that your behavior was being monitored and judged. The only downside, Gabriel suspected, would be the hipsters, assured by the mismatched chairs that Tabula Rasa wasn’t too mainstream. The chairs were probably a ploy. A good one.

Really, not the worst place to start a new life.

###

Update: Baking without archangel powers was hella challenging. Yeah, he could follow instructions, but Gabriel was accustomed to snapping his fingers and having a perfectly-cooked croissant appear in his hand, not sifting and stirring and preheating the oven and watching and _waiting._ That would take some getting used to.

Cashier duty was another bull to ride. Like the baking, Gabriel was not about to let it buck him off. While nine out of ten customers were perfectly civil, there was always that one who made Gabriel consider he’d chosen the wrong side of the apocalypse conflict. That one customer who represented the dredges of humanity. A short man in a pastel suit ordered a latte from the barista, then gawked at the bakery display as if offended. He turned to look Gabriel dead in the eye and asked, “Where are the cranberry orange muffins?”

“We just sold the last one, but there are more in the oven,” Gabriel answered.

“What?” the man asked. “I come here every day and there is always a cranberry orange muffin for me.”

“They’ll be done in five minutes. They’ll even be _warm._ ”

“I don’t want a warm muffin. I want a room temperature muffin.” His eyes narrowed, focusing on Gabriel’s nametag. “Are you new here, _Gabriel?”_

“Yeah.” _Dickwad._

“Well, when a customer asks for something, and it’s not out front, you’re supposed to check the back.”

“There’s nothing in the back,” Gabriel insisted. “I work back there.”

“You have to check anyways.”

Withholding a sigh, Gabriel walked into the back of the bakery, checked on the muffins, then walked back. “I’m sorry. We don’t have any, but the next batch will be ready in two minutes.”

“You said five minutes before.”

“That was three minutes ago.”

“Oh. My. God. You know what? Fine. I don’t even care if it’s hot. Just give me one from the batch in the oven.”

“They’re not cooked all the way yet.”

“I said I don’t care.”

Gabriel heaved a sigh and went to go pull one out. Fine. Let the bastard burn himself. He brought it out to the front counter.

The guy was gone. He hadn’t paid for his latte.

If Gabriel had still been a juiced-up archangel, he would have given that son of a bitch lactose intolerance—the lethal variety. Gabriel was nothing if not dangerously petty.

###

Over the next few weeks, Gabriel took to the job like a wingless duck to water. Powers or not, he told himself, he was still an archangel, and he was going raise the roof on this fake-hipster shindig. He watched a lot of Food Network baking shows and read up on a few books, most of them with decadent cupcakes littering the front covers. He came in one morning with a batch of chocolate-toffee cookies for the owner to try. She gave him a verbal pat on the head and let him put them on the shelf as a weekly special. They went well with espresso, she claimed—not, she added, that Gabriel would know what espresso tasted like under the heaps of sugar he threw into his drinks.

“I have a sweet tooth,” he answered with a shrug.

“And about ten cavities, too, I’d wager.” A perfectly plucked brow rose high on her brow as she smirked ever-so-slightly down at him. Raelyn was a five-foot-ten trans-woman with a fake tan and a nose that was practically razor-edged. He’d rarely seen her wear anything longer than knee length because, as she said, “This is my damn business and I’ll do as I please.” Gabriel could get behind that.

“Oh, please,” he told her, “You wouldn’t have hired me if I wasn’t a sexier version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy.”

“We should get you the hat,” she quipped before she had to run out front to handle a customer situation. She would have sent Gabriel if he wasn’t already elbow-deep in flour. He had coffee cakes in the oven by the time she returned. “Ugh,” she complained, hands on her hips, “we need a new barista now that school is starting up again. Have I ever told you how much I hate interviewing people?”

“Yeah,” Gabriel said, “right after you interviewed _me._ ”

“I told you because you were the first person to walk through those doors and act like an honest-to-God _human being_ ,” she replied. Gabriel barely refrained from scoffing at the irony. “Usually people just turn into robots the second they sit in the chair—they smile mechanically, give all these scripted answers—it’s awful.”

“I hear ya, sister,” said Gabriel. There had been plenty of angels who’d imagined they’d needed to be on their _best behavior_ around their glorious archangel older brother, way back in the day. He’d wanted to shake them until their personalities came spilling out. “You should have seen some of my siblings at Sunday Dinners. The ones that weren’t trying to decapitate each other.”

She went from distraught to laser-focused in point-two seconds. “I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned your family before. And I’ve told you all about growing up with my three older brothers and not exactly being the girl my parents were hoping for.”

“You are the best girl your parents could have hoped for,” Gabriel assured her. The first time she’d told that story, he’d thought it would have been the kind of prank he would have pulled once upon a time. Beautifully ironic. It took some time before he began to sympathize with her struggle to be herself in a world that always expected someone else. “I was born fourth, too, except I also have tons of little brothers and sisters.”

“What, are your parents the really religious kind who don’t believe in birth control?”

Gabriel could have cried from laughter. “You have no idea. Anyway, my three older brothers were total dicks and Dad was never around, so I ran away from home.”

“Oh, Gabey, I’m sorry,” said Raelyn as she rushed to hug him. “Are things alright now?”

Gabriel wasn’t quite sure what to do about this hugging situation or that Dad-awful nickname. He went for an awkward back-pat. “Things are fine. I mean, my second-oldest brother stabbed me last time I saw him, but you know—life is a box of chocolates, and I guess a few of them have to be chock full o’ nuts.”

“How is that _fine?_ ”

“Because _I_ don’t have to deal with them anymore.” Gabriel grinned as wide as he could. Maybe if he was convincing enough, Raelyn would stop choking him with sincerity. “C’mon, Rae, I’ve got muffins to make, and you’ve got a job opening to post.”

“Fine, fine.” She backed off with a final pat to his shoulder. “But if you ever need help or want to talk, you know where to find me.”

After she’d scampered out of sight, Gabriel let his grin drop into a more somber expression. He hadn’t thought much about his family in a while. Hell, he didn’t even know if half of them were alive. No angel juice meant no angel radio. He’d had a weird coma-dream that involved that hack Metatron trying to take over Heaven, and teaming up on a pseudo-mission with a Castiel who looked more ragged than Gabriel had ever seen him.

It plagued him as he was getting ready for bed. No angel juice _also_ meant no infinite ability to stay awake. _Sleep_ , man. He needed sleep. The baker-slash-former-archangel tumbled into bed with only the knowledge that the apocalypse was over and the understanding that not everyone would have made it to the other side. Part of him didn’t want to know. He held his fingers up above his head and snapped them.

The lights clicked off.

Gabriel didn’t regret having his lights switched out for snap-activated. Anything to make him feel just a little bit like his old self.


	2. Your Coffee Is Bitter, Just Like You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tabula Rasa needs a new barista and Gabriel isn't the only undead angel anymore.

“I found a new barista,” Raelyn announced. “Kind of serious, but he seems like the responsible type who’d be able to deal with the crappy customers.”

“I’m sure we could knock a sense of humor into him,” replied Gabriel, plucking at the nametag on his chest, which proudly read “Loki.” He’d been known to tamper with any nametags left unattended during bathroom breaks. Several us his coworkers had also taken up what they called The Nametag Game. To date, Gabriel had been Candyland, Willy Wonka, and Gabby. Raelyn would be more upset about it if it wasn’t so damn funny. Of course, she made sure to check their nametags before rush hour—a process that involved a military-style line up and salutes at the end. One day she had them switch nametags after they’d all had fun with the others’. The next morning, she found a bejeweled pin on her desk, which read “Boss Lady.” She wore it on occasion.

“Maybe lay off on the nametag game for a week or two,” Raelyn suggested. “And I’d appreciate it if you could all be acceptable variations of your legal names when the new guy comes in. So Gabe or Gabriel today, alright?”

“Fine,” Gabriel groaned dramatically. “So when _is_ he coming in?”

“He’ll be here around two to fill out his paperwork and get the tour. Try not to scare him off, okay? It’s hard finding people who can work morning shifts.”

Gabriel swore he’d do his best not to harass the new guy.

He regretted it the second the other walked through the door. Gabriel froze halfway through kneading bread and the other man did his best statue impression. “ _Gabriel?_ ” he whispered.

“Raphael?” Don’t panic, don’t panic. “What are you doing here?”

Raelyn chose that moment to stroll on in, a clipboard at her side. “You two know each other?” she asked.

“You could say that,” Gabriel answered. “In fact, would you mind if we caught up for a minute? Outside?”

“Sure, just as soon as Raphael and I finish up the paperwork and you finish up that bread. Unless this is going to be a problem?”

“No…” Raphael said slowly, “not a problem at all.”

Gabriel glared up at the ceiling. _Gee, thanks, Dad._ At least Raph might have more answers than Gabriel did.

###

The back lot reeked of cigarette smoke and, for the first time in his life, Gabriel had an actual fear of cancer. He tucked his hand into his pockets to as to look nonchalant in front of Raphael. The man’s raised eyebrow clearly said, “Nice try, I’ve known you since you were a fledgling, you nervous wreck.” Meanwhile, he was six feet of solidified calm; a dark, unflinching silhouette against the crumbling brick wall behind him.

“So what brings you to this neck of the depressingly suburban woods?” Gabriel asked.

“Death,” answered Raphael blandly. “Our darling little brother Castiel decided I was better off in bloody chunks.”

“ _Castiel?_ ”

“Mm. He launched a rebellion that might have even topped Lucifer’s. He made himself God.”

That…sounded vaguely familiar. It might have featured in Gabriel’s coma dream. “Alright, so Castiel gave you the boot, and then…?”

“I woke up in a hospital, in this body, and when I was given clothes, an advertisement for this job opening was in the pocket.”

“Yeah, I got the same deal,” answered Gabriel. “So what? Dad wants us all to run a bakery together? Are Luci and Mike gonna pop in next? Run the register, lift the heavy boxes?”

“They were both still alive, last I knew.” Raphael, if at all possible, became more serious. “Lucifer and Michael were locked in the cage together. I had planned to release them before Castiel staged his coup.”

“You mean before he blasted your brains out?” Gabriel smiled sardonically. “Can’t say I blame him. Dick move: restarting the apocalypse. Knew I liked that kid for a reason.”

Raphael narrowed his eyes, but resisted Gabriel’s attempts at instigation. He knew where that road led. “ _In any case_ , I do not know why Father would have brought us back, and I can only assume our lack of grace is because rebuilding archangels would take time. It is, nevertheless, good to see He has returned.”

“Or _maybe,_ ”—Gabriel walked forward until he was right up in his big brother’s face—“Dad just decided we’d all be better off as human, so when we screwed up, we wouldn’t end the world with us.” With effort, Gabriel forced his smile to be as douche-y as possible. “Either way, _Raphy_ , I think you’ve got some lattes to make. Hope they’re not as bitter as you. After all, Daddy ain’t gonna pay your bills forever.”

The mildly unsure expression that broke through Raphael’s stony façade was infinitely more satisfying than Gabriel could have dreamed.

###

Gabriel loved watching Raphael getting taken down a few pegs. It was no secret that Raphael had always seen humans as completely inferior, and so being forced to obey their whims was a beautiful irony Gabriel had to appreciate. The older archangel would have walked out three times over already if he hadn’t been convinced that it was all part of their Father’s plan. Gabriel was content to leave him to his delusions. His personal beliefs were that this was a slap-dash attempt to get the band back together out of sentimentality.

Like many an older brother, though, Raphael refused to admit he was wrong. In fact, so adamant was he in his rightness, that he stormed into Gabriel’s apartment at eight o’clock at night with a stack of books.

“No,” Gabriel whined, “my show’s on.”

“Your show is fictional; our lives are quite real,” Raphael argued. “Father wouldn’t bring us back to life without cause. There has to be a clue somewhere.”

“Not in my apartment, there isn’t.”

Raphael popped open the first tome. A cloud of dust rose from it. “I’ve collected a number of accounts wherein the dead return to life. Perhaps the human interpretations include perspectives we do not have.”

Gabriel’s eye caught on a title. “Dude, _Harry Potter?”_

“He is called the Boy Who Lived, is he not?”

“And you were on my case about fictional entertainment.” Gabriel settled back into his couch. He determined that the best course of action was to ignore Raphael’s existence. “Fine, you be a nerd, I’ll watch my show.”

###

Raphael got far too wrapped up in the _Harry Potter_ series _._ He’d branded it as a purely human creation that debated issues of life, death, and immortality from a critical perspective. That was a load of bull. Gabriel knew Raphael identified with Hogwarts on a personal level. Lots of kids, lots of magic, lots of mayhem. Not enough adult supervision. Just like Heaven. Gabriel had always had a particular fondness for the Weasley twins.

Sometimes, when it got slow, Gabriel would catch him sneaking in a chapter. This was such an occasion until the door dinged its grating little ding, announcing a customer, and he jumped right back to the front lines. (What Raphael did not notice was that his nametag now read “Turtle.” As in the Teenage Mutant Ninja variety.) The customer was a short, thin man with a child-like smile. “One black coffee and one coffee cake, please,” he ordered.

“Got a fresh batch right here,” Gabriel called from the back. He wasn’t technically supposed to—there were still slices on the shelf—but he liked this guy. He’d rolled into town two weeks ago on a “business trip.” Garth, he said his name was.

“You’re the best, Gabe,” Garth called back.

Raphael’s backward glare chastised Gabriel for ignoring the rules, but Gabriel knew the bastard couldn’t do much about it. Complaints to Raelyn would seem petty.

Garth took his order and settled down at a corner table with his laptop. Whatever business he did, it kept odd hours and involved a lot of research. About ten minutes in, his phone rang. “Sam!” he greeted with sincere enthusiasm. “Whatcha up to?” There was a pause while he waited for the answer. “Yeah, I’m out there right now. I have to say, I was kind of surprised when you guys asked me to check it out for you. I thought you wanted me to stay with the fam….No, I don’t mind! It’s no problem. I kind of missed it, actually.”

Gabriel kept the conversation running on the backburner. It all seemed so casual until Garth leaned up against the counter and asked, “Hey, Gabe, so when I got into town, someone told me to look out for huge dogs running across the street. That a few people got into car accidents. Do you know what’s up with that? I mean, is it an urban legend, or is Balto on the loose?”

Crap. Guy was a hunter. Gabriel tried to calculate the odds that the Sam on the phone had been Sam Winchester. Knowing his life, pretty high. Which meant Gabriel had a choice. He could reach out to them, ask what had happened after he’d died, and if there was any reason two dead archangels would be brought back to life.

Or he could wrap himself up in this normal little life for a while longer, like a soft blanket, and hope the fight didn’t find him.

“I don’t know much about it,” Gabriel decided on. “Why? Are you some kind of urban legend investigator?”

“More of a hobby, really. Thanks anyway.” Garth waved behind him as he vanished out the door.

“A hunter?” Raphael asked.

“Yeah.” Gabriel stared after him. “Probably best to blend in for now.”

“You’re right,” Raphael agreed and—oh—that must have killed him to admit it. “It’s best we lay low while we are without powers. I’d rather not face any who might feel threatened by the return of the archangels.”

That, too.

“I’m surprised, though,” continued Raphael, and Gabriel winced preemptively. “I thought you were rather buddy-buddy with the Winchesters the last time you were on Earth.”

“Means to an end,” Gabriel explained with a vague hand wave. “Besides, who knows if they’re even still alive?”

“It’s the _Winchesters_. Trust me, they’re alive.”

###

Sunday afternoon and here Raphael was, at Gabriel’s door again. This had become a habit. Raphael would trudge in with heaps of books, throw them on Gabriel’s table, and read while Gabriel caught up on his Netflix queue. As long as he kept his mouth shut, his older brother wasn’t terrible to have around. Gabriel could only watch him sit and read for so long, though, without feeling secondhand eyesore. No, tonight was a night for subterfuge.

Stage 1: Make unobtrusive moves towards the DVD player. Put in the first _Harry Potter_ movie.

Stage 2: Let the menu play loudly while he made popcorn.

Stage 3: Watch Raphael struggle to divide his attention between his book and the film. Ten minutes in, the book was only in Raph’s hand for pretenses. Gabriel offered up the bucket of popcorn.

As the first movie was wrapping up, Gabriel stretched and said, “I’m gonna order pizza.”

Raphael rushed to return to reading, pretending as if he hadn’t stopped in the first place. Nerd. “If you must.”

“Oh, I must. Hawaiian sound good?” At the blank look, Gabriel elaborated, “Ham and pineapple?”

“Pineapple does not belong on a pizza.”

“You’d be surprised.”

Gabriel realized, belatedly, as he walked down to the parking lot, that they were having Sunday Dinner together. Them. Two archangels. And nothing had been obliterated yet. Talk about miracles.

The pizza place was right down the road. The drive really wasn’t worth the delivery fee, even though Gabriel’s car sounded like a soul in Hell whenever he turned it on. His Dad had gone a long way to make sure Gabriel blended in. He zipped down to Peace-a-Pizza, the local place that was owned by a pair of organic-loving hippies, and sighed when their front door made the same annoying _ding_ as Tabula Rasa. _Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings,_ chimed in the voice from _It’s a Wonderful Life._ Gabriel flexed his shoulders. Still no wings.

After ten minutes of scrolling through internet memes, the counter called his name. Gabriel skipped over to procure pizza. “Thanks, how— _Samandriel?_ ”


	3. With Extra Cheese

Though Raphael no longer had the powers of an archangel, his hearing remained strong enough that he could distinctly make out two sets of footsteps pounding up the stairs before the front door to Gabriel’s apartment burst open. “Raph!” Gabriel shouted. “Look who I found! And just at the end of his shift, too.”

Raphael peeked up from his book to see a baby-faced young man in a pizza uniform, his hat crooked and his cheeks slightly flushed. Raphael stood up. “Samandriel?”

“Raphael.” Samandriel’s posture went ramrod straight, as if expecting an inspection. “I thought you were…Castiel had…”

“We were both dead, bucko,” Gabriel explained. “Dad brought us back, sans angel juice.”

“Oh.” Whatever steel had been keeping the younger angel upright turned soft at the news. Relief. “That’s what happened to me as well. Hence this.” He plucked at his nametag. It read, “Alfie.” Samandriel smiled at it with wry fondness. “Alfie was the name of my vessel last I was on Earth, but it…grew on me.”

They shared stories. Samandriel had been killed on Naomi’s orders for giving up information under torture—a demon had figured out how to “hack his brain,” and he’d been labeled compromised. The young angel refused to identify the individual who had carried out the orders. “It wasn’t his fault,” Samandriel insisted. He segued hastily in to the next part of his story to avoid lingering on it. Samandriel had jolted awake in a holding cell. The police had told him that they’d found him sleeping at a bus stop. He’d been pretty out of it when they took him in. His ID had named him as one Alfredo Angelino, age seventeen. They threw him at a youth center, whose director helped him find a job, realizing that he’d be kicked out soon enough. He’d started work at the pizza place. In seven months, he’d turned eighteen, and the youth center would start counting down its one-month grace period before he needed to find other lodgings.

“Here,” Gabriel said at the end. “You can stay here.” He may have sucked as a big brother the first time around, but he wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

Raphael made quick work of ruining his gesture. “In what space, brother? Your apartment isn’t equipped for two people.”

“It’s okay,” Samandriel assured them, “I’ll be fine on my—”

“You’re family,” Gabriel insisted, with a firm hand on the younger man’s shoulder, “and, like it or not, we’re all in this crap storm together.”

“Like we were the first time?” Samandriel’s voice, though it didn’t rise, was nonetheless reproachful. “I appreciate the offer, but Gabriel, you _left._ For centuries.”

The accusation hit like a bullet to the chest. The truth hurt that way. It didn’t matter how many smiles and band-aids he plastered over it—he’d abandoned his brothers and sisters to go play Trickster. “I know,” he admitted. His will couldn’t force his eyes to meet Samandriel’s. “I was crappy big brother. I left because it was easier than watching our family fall apart. I didn’t do anything to stop it and I should have. I’m sorry. If you’ll give me a chance, though, I want to try to save what we have left.”

Samandriel stared at him hard, as if that would force any kind of insincerity to the surface. It was a long moment before he nodded. “I’d like that, too.”

###

The youth center wasn’t so keen on letting Samandriel go, despite Gabriel being his older brother, with the same last name even. They didn’t have much choice, however, after they discovered a document that legally cleared both Gabriel and Raphael as suitable temporary replacement guardians. In contrast, moving Samandriel in had been quick and simple. He had three pairs of clothes to his name and not much else. Gabriel tried to smother the rage in his stomach that their Father would leave Gabriel and Raphael relatively well-off while poor little Samandriel had to wake up as a homeless orphan. Even assuming Dad had meant for Gabriel or Raphael to take him in, what with that paperwork stunt, that didn’t make it okay, and if Gabriel ever saw their Father again, he planned to be very vocal about that.

Gabriel stared at his apartment for a good hour, occasionally shifting an object or two, trying to figure out how he could make this space work for now. The fact that he could only afford an air mattress and a room divider to create a separate space for his little brother left his chest feeling compressed, as if he was deep underwater. “Just for now, ‘kay, kid?” he’d assured his younger brother. “As soon as my rent agreement ends, you’ll have your own space. Promise.”

“Thank you,” said Samandriel, sitting on the edge of the mattress, “for taking me in.”

Gabriel plopped down next to him. In a rare moment of brotherly affection, he felt the need to ruffle Samandriel’s hair. His eyes caught the nametag on the floor. “So, Alfie, huh?”

Samandriel picked it up with the tiniest of smiles. “It’s easier to say than ‘Samandriel.’ If Dad did intend for us to stay hidden, I suppose my name would have, as they say, stuck out like a sore thumb.”

“Yeah,” Gabriel laughed, “I’m just imagining standing in the grocery store and shouting, ‘Samandriel!’ from three aisles over.”

“I suppose that might blow our cover.” He ran his fingers over the letters. “The funny thing is: I’ve started getting used to it. When you called me Samandriel, I was…startled. It was almost surreal.”

Gabriel considered his own astonishment when the ID in his wallet had announced _Gabriel Angelino_. He’d been telling Raphael about Dad’s little joke when his brother had silently removed a military ID from his wallet: _Raphael DeAngelo_. So why Alfredo Angelino? Gabriel didn’t ponder it long. He’d leave that to Raphael, who still believed in grand plans. (And would no-doubt develop a theory about Gabriel and Samandriel sharing a last name.) Gabriel had long since concluded Dad’s plots were all shitake. Whole fields of shitake. Gabriel worked better on the ground level. He asked his brother, “Do you want us to call you Alfie?”

The boy kept staring at the nametag. “It would be best to in public.”

The non-answer told Gabriel that Angel Soft here didn’t know for certain yet. Gabriel could relate. “You know,” he said, “when I left Heaven the first time, I threw myself into being the Trickster. I was so mad at Dad and our siblings that it was like a freaking vacation taking on Loki’s identity.” Loki’s life was fun and games and sex, always turning tail or chasing tail, while Gabriel’s had been strangled with bad family ties. “When Sam and Dean Winchester cottoned on that I was an angel? Telling them my name was Gabriel felt like joining a chain gang.”

 _Gabriel,_ he’d said. _They call me Gabriel._ “They” and not “I” because he hadn’t called himself Gabriel in centuries.

“Why are you telling me this?” Samandriel wondered.

“So that you know,” assured Gabriel, “that I’m not trying to put you on that chain gang. I don’t want you pretending to be someone you don’t want to be, just because Raph and I are here. Big brothers are there to catch you when you fall, not to tell you where to fly.”

Samandriel let the pin drop to his lap. He was shaking with silent laughter, a wet sheen in his eyes that wasn’t quite tears.

“What?” whined Gabriel. “Here I am, trying to be nice, and you’re laughing at me.”

“It’s just,” Samandriel sighed, “you said almost that exact same thing when I was a fledgling. Do you remember teaching us how to fly?”

“Yeah.” Gabriel’s face went soft. “You were all so cute, hopping across the ground, trying to lift off. I’d take you up and hold on until you could glide on your own.”

“Then you’d let us go. You said you couldn’t carry us our whole lives, but that you wouldn’t let us fall. We believed you.” The syllables throbbed like a pulse—a deep, reassuring rhythm. “I still believe you.”

Samandriel’s words carried weight that sat on Gabriel’s chest. He had a notion that that sensation was called _responsibility._ Emotion threatened to overcome him if he didn’t diffuse this with a joke right this minute. He forced a smirk. “Shucks, kid, you’re making me blush.”

He realized that Dad had given him more than a second chance at life: Dad had given him a second chance at being a brother.


	4. Club Runaway

Between being human, early mornings, tough customers, Raphael’s rants about Dad’s plans, and searching for two-bedroom apartments, Gabriel felt ready to burst. “Fun,” he whined to Raphael over the counter, “I need fun.”

“Why is this my problem?”

“Because if I have to watch you read one more book in my apartment, my brain is going to look like that time I told you to watch the muffins: burnt.”

“And why,” asked a high voice, “is Raphael reading books in your apartment?” Cue Raelyn. Their boss had her usual manicured eyebrow high up on her head, and her usual shorts high up on her legs, an apron brushing against the hems. With hands on her hips, she continued, “I can never figure out if you’re friends, enemies, or an old married couple, the way you two bicker.”

“We’re not married,” Raphael supplied. He side-eyed their resident Trickster as if to warn him against taking this cover story for a joy ride. “I wouldn’t have called us friends, but I have to admit, I was surprised to find him here. I suppose you could say it was like seeing a ghost.”

“Boo!” mocked Gabriel, jumping forward with childish claw-hands that looked more like jazz hands. He smirked on his way back to the kitchen. “Hey, Rae, know anywhere fun around here?”

“Depends on your kind of fun.”

###

Gabriel ended up at a bar, with plans to get tipsy and hopes to get laid. Being an angel had meant alcohol wasn’t really a thing, unless you wanted to drink a liquor store dry. In contrast, Gabriel found the fruity drinks with the umbrellas endlessly entertaining. Although they did result in guys hitting on him.

“What is it about the umbrella,” said Gabriel, “that screams ‘I’m gay?’”

The bartender snickered. “Oh my God,” she gasped, “you’re not?”

“Not usually,” he answered, resting his chin on his palm. He flicked the umbrella. “I just have a sweet tooth and the sweet drinks come with umbrellas.”

“Tell you what,” she said, leaning over the counter, “I’ll try to make the next one look extra manly. You strike me as a Long Island Ice Tea kind of guy.”

Gabriel grinned. “Hit me up.”

###

Long Island Ice Teas were not for ex-archangels with undeveloped alcohol tolerances. Around him, the world teased at staying steady, only to sway when he turned his head. Around one third of the way through his drink, a girl had strode in and taken tequila shots like she was on a mission. One, two, three. One, two, three.

He made an expression that could only be called impressed, before slipping into his trademark Trickster grin. “That was enough lime to count as your daily serving of fruit.”

She scoffed. “My sodium might be a little high, though.”

“Yeah, I bet your liver’s really worried about all that _sodium_.”

“ _Na._ ” She almost broke into tears laughing. “Get it? Na? Because on the periodic table sodium is NA?”

Gabriel barely refrained from telling her she was hammered, then asking if she needed a nail to tie it all together. Because he was classier than that. He did, however, against his will, _giggle,_ as by that point he was nearing the end of his Long Island Ice Tea. “Cute.”

“Not bad yourself.”

Gabriel would take “cute.” Hell, he’d take cute all the way to the bedroom if he could manage it. He rattled through his buzzed brain for suave lines. All he ended up with was “I’m Gabriel.”

She smiled. Leaned forward. Put her hand on the table next to him.

It was a beautiful, sexy, promising moment broken by a skirmish from the other side of the room. “Alright, man,” said the doorman, his hold on a skinny guy, “I think it’s time you leave.”

“Well I didn’t ask for your opinion,” slurred back the skinny guy with a thick British accent.

“You know I’m allowed to physically remove you from the premises.”

“That sounds more like flirting than threatening.”

The voice and face clicked in Gabriel’s head. _Dammit._ He glanced at the girl beside him. It was a grueling moment of contemplation. He toed the line between groaning audibly and smashing his palm against his face. Somehow, he thought as he stood, this was divine punishment. “Sorry,” he apologized to the girl. He wrote his number on a napkin and gave her a wink before striding toward the bar entrance.

He doubted she’d call him.

_Double-dammit._

“Hey!” Gabriel shouted toward the doorman, friendly as could be, “I’ve got it, man.” The doorman looked momentarily bewildered, but let Gabriel haul the drunk British asshole outside.

Said drunk British asshole blinked blearily at him before his whole face lit up in a crooked grin. He threw his hands in the air, as if to go for a hug, but not getting close enough to actually manage it. “Gabriel!” he shouted. “You’re not dead either! We could be a club. Oh, speaking of clubs—”

“Balthazar.” Gabriel went for the hug. Possibly because he was also drunk. Balthazar began laughing, which made Gabriel laugh, and they proceeded to make gasping idiots out of themselves on the street outside the bar. “Thank Dad it was you,” Gabriel moaned. “Everyone else who got brought back has no sense of fun.”

“Shame. Fortunate for us, the night is still young.” Balthazar hadn’t dropped his smarmy smirk once. “I have questions, but I’m not in the mood for serious discussions tonight _._ I woke up three hours ago: I intend to _celebrate_.”

Gabriel cast one last mourning look at the bar and the girl he’d abandoned, then clapped Balthazar on the shoulder. He could already tell: his libido was going to hate him for this new dedication to being a good big brother. He tried to tell himself that the girl was probably too drunk anyways—would have fallen asleep in the cab ride. He forced a grin. “Hells yeah. Let’s go.”

###

Raphael rarely received phone calls at two in the morning, let alone phone calls from Samandriel at two in the morning. He picked it up at the higher end of human speed. “Samandriel? Is something wrong?”

“Balthazar is alive. Gabriel found him. In a bar. They’re both very inebriated and unconscious. They tried to build a pillow fort. What do I do?”

“Take a picture.”

“Raphael, I’m serious.”

“As am I.” Honestly, the little angels were so easy to shake up. He ran a hand over his face. “So long as they are breathing, roll them onto their sides and put a bottle of ibuprofen on the counter. They’ll be sore and unhappy tomorrow, but they are by far old enough to understand the concept of consequence.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“And Samandriel?”

“Yes?”

“In the future, I would not recommend calling me unless they’re _not_ breathing.”

“Understood.”

###

Gabriel hadn’t felt this awful since he’d woken up in a hospital, years after dying. Sweat slicked his skin from the stifling heat he was cocooned in. His back ached from sleeping mostly on the floor, surrounded by a wreckage of bedding and a few scattered couch cushions. All in all, he felt like hell. A barely-stirring Balthazar seemed to agree with him.

“Whatever we did,” concluded Balthazar in a whisper, “must have been truly awe-inspiring, because I can’t remember half of it.”

“We did karaoke,” Gabriel informed him. It was coming back to him now. He’d been less drunk than his brother. “A lot of karaoke. You sang _My Heart Will Go On_.”

“Sarcastically, I’m sure,” said Balthazar. “I hate that bloody song. Altered the timeline once to get rid of it.”

“You’re one of those people who thought there was enough room on the plank for two, aren’t you? You’re too bitter not to be.” He tried to sit up and was treated to an unexpected rollercoaster ride. “Ow.”

“Seconded.”

Gabriel would have to thank Samandriel later for leaving the ibuprofen out on the counter, where Gabriel was less likely to seriously injure himself unburying it. Next to it was a note that read, very clearly, “TAKE 2. Only 2.”

The ex-archangel considered taking three just to spite instruction, but decided against it. Overdosing on ibuprofen wouldn’t do him any favors after last night. He dumped a few out before handing the bottle to Balthazar, who _did_ pop three to be controversial. They chased it down with water and dry toast.

It was around one when Gabriel’s phone chirped that he had a text from Raphael, though the name came up _Killjoy._ The message contained a single photo: Gabriel and Balthazar dead asleep, sprawled awkwardly beneath a half-finished pillow fort like toddlers. Now that he saw it, Gabriel had vague recollections of attempting to hold a serious conversation about pillow forts bearing striking similarity to certain nooks in Heaven. This was followed by the two older angels endeavoring to build a pillow fort in Gabriel’s room with the cushions from the pull-out and a few blankets. Samandriel had hovered as a vague, concerned presence. He must have contacted Raphael.

Gabriel texted his younger brother, _Traitor._

Samandriel replied, _Sorry, not sorry._ He’d clearly been spending too much time with human teenagers. And Gabriel.

Balthazar looked on with intrigue. “What an odd situation this is,” he commented. “Four angels reincarnated as humans, living amongst the masses.”

“You want odd?” Gabriel asked. He clicked a few buttons on his phone. “Here’s a picture of Raphael in an apron.”

“Oh, and the visor to match.” Balthazar took no small amount of glee in seeing evidence that Raphael had been knocked down a few pegs. “Tabula Rasa?”

“The café. He’s a barista. I’m a baker. Samandriel’s at the pizza place down the street.”

“Curiouser and curiouser. My death seems to have landed me in Wonderland.”

“Join the club.” Gabriel rolled his eyes. “We all woke up in the middle of lives we never lived. Raph thinks this is all a big set-up. He’s been trying to figure out Dad’s intentions based on what _magazines_ are holding up the wobbly leg on his coffee table.”

“I take it you don’t much care for that approach.”

“If he’s not going to talk to us, I’m sure as hell not going to follow his scavenger hunt.”

“You made that pretty clear the first time you disappeared.”

Gabriel abruptly diverted his attention to the middle distance. Here it was, the old ball ‘n’ chain, weighing him down again.

“I don’t blame you,” continued Balthazar. “Actually, I took a page out of your playbook—faked my own death, enjoyed the more deviant delights Earth had to offer. But Heaven always comes calling, doesn’t it?”

“That it does, bro.” Gabriel took measured breaths, pretending that the nausea was from his hangover. “That. It. Does.”


	5. Hiraeth

“Dogs,” said Raphael, by way of greeting as he stepped into Gabriel’s apartment Sunday afternoon. A thick folder consisting of two newspaper articles, a tabloid, four internet printouts, and pages of notes that ran the spectrum of languages were slapped onto the coffee table.

“Um,” muttered Samandriel, poking the papers with hesitation. “What about them? Are you getting a dog? Beagles are nice.”

“I swear, Raph,” Gabriel called from the kitchen, “if you’re basing any of your theories on that kid’s movie where all the dogs go to Heaven—”

Raphael, despite no longer being an archangel who could rip a person apart with a look, glared as though he could. “There were two people mauled to death within a thirty mile radius, with no witnesses. The coroner reported it looked like dog attacks.”

“So?” Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “Is your newly human ass worried about animal control not doing its job?”

“Hellhounds, Gabriel,” Raphael sighed, the way one generally did when surrounded by morons. “What if they’re hellhounds? Do you think it would be good if a demon learned about a cluster of angels back from the dead?”

“Oh,” Samadriel concluded, going somewhat pale. Eloquence failed him. “That would be bad.”

“And unlikely,” Gabriel added. “If they’re hellhounds, they’re just collecting on deals, and those aren’t even supervised most of the time. We’re fine.”

Raphael was not calmed. “Unless we’re near the territory of a crossroads demon. You know they’ve become more… _entrepreneurial_ lately.”

There was a major point Raphael was missing. Like any proper younger sibling, Gabriel saw the need to point it out in as arrogant a voice as possible. “And what are you going to do about it? Investigate? Track it down? Kill it? Blow our cover in the process?” When Raphael didn’t respond, Gabriel could smell victory—and vegetables that were going to be too roasted in about two minutes. He walked back to the kitchen. “Sit down, read your notes, whatever, but dinner will be reading in fifteen minutes and I don’t want to hear a word about hellhounds at the table.”

###

 

Sunday dinner was not an act of intention, but happened more often than not, regardless of anyone planning it or willingly participating. Once they’d all ended up at the same diner by coincidence and had stared awkwardly at each other from their adjoining tables. This Sunday was no different, except for the addition of Balthazar to the table. He and Raphael made obvious attempts to ignore the other.

“I feel like I’m missing something,” noted Gabriel.

“Salt?” Raphael suggested, nigh-innocently, as he doused his food in it. There was probably enough sodium in his bloodstream to make demonic possession impossible. Given his recent belief, he might have even been willing to try it.

Balthazar was a little more forthcoming. He explained, “A little bad blood is all.”

“A little.” Raphael scoffed and put down the salt shaker. “Balthazar stole most of the weapons from Heaven, disappeared, then joined the rebellion against me.”

“You wanted the apocalypse. I didn’t.”

“And how did that work out for you?” mocked Raphael. “That’s right: literally stabbed in the back. I told you Castiel was a traitor.”

“Don’t act so high and mighty,” Balthazar sneered. “It doesn’t appear you won either.”

Watching the argument was not unlike watching a balloon being inflated, its skin stretched thinner and thinner as it grew, until—

_Pop!_

Samandriel stood up so fast that the table shook. “No one _won_ ,” he all but shouted. The table went instantly silent in the face of such as rare occurrence as Samandriel raising his voice. “There is no winning with war because all war does is create desperation, and desperation breeds monsters.”

Crap. This situation needed to be diffused, decided Gabriel. “Okaaaaay, anyone want pie? I made pie. Blueberry.” His attempts fell flat.

Raphael stood from his chair. “You’ve outlived us all, Samandriel, by _years,_ and yet you never say exactly what happened. Why is that?”

“Mostly?” asked Samandriel. The kind of hauntedness in his eyes stripped the youth from his face. “I want to forget it. We averted the apocalypse, but the world seemed like it _wanted_ to end. What stopped one battle always started another. They got worse and worse and _worse_.” He smiled and it was heartbreaking. “When the apocalypse didn’t happen, the angels were lost. Raphael tried to restart the apocalypse to give us purpose. Many other angels didn’t agree, but Castiel went off the rails. He decided he needed to be _God_. He betrayed his friends, his family, and swallowed all the souls in Purgatory just to _stop you,_ Raphael.

“His vessel failed under the strain, and the Leviathans were released, and though he lived, he was not…sane. He drove himself mad attempting to atone. He’d beaten you, Raphael, but he couldn’t _lead._ It was a time of chaos, and the perfect opportunity for Naomi to seize control. Naomi reigned using fear as a weapon. She brainwashed so many of us. She was desperate to restore order.

When the Angel and Demon tablets resurfaced, she and Crowley pulled out all the stops. Crowley kidnapped and tortured me for weeks. Did you know that if you lobotomize an angel, they’ll answer any question you ask? That they can’t stop themselves? That there are things they don’t know they know?” He paused to let that sink in. “Naomi ordered another angel to rescue me, and that same angel killed me. I didn’t tell you his name because it wasn’t him. Not really. He was brainwashed. I knew the signs. At the end, I wondered if it was all that different from when our father had been around.” He looked at each of them in the eye, coldly. “I don’t care if I’m never an angel again. I don’t need the tyranny. I’ve already watched too many people I love break.”

Silence flooded the room like a tidal wave, pushing them beneath its surface, filling their lungs. Drowning them. It was crushing, thought Gabriel, to watch someone’s home become their hell. He would know. Been there, done that.

Surprisingly, it was Balthazar who spoke up first. “Bloody good speech, mate,” he said.

Gabriel felt the press of responsibility against his chest—the one he’d tried to outrun for so long. “Samandriel,” he called. The youngest reacted in slow motion, shoulders tensed, prepared to be attacked. Using great caution, Gabriel moved toward his youngest brother. “I know. War sucks. It’s brutal and it’s bloody and it whittles people’s souls down to toothpicks. But you’re _out_ now. You can go be Alfie and have friends and a normal life. And if Dad comes calling, you can say _no._ No one makes—” He had to stop to breathe. Was this what the beginnings of a panic attack felt like? The memories in his head were razor-edged. He voice became a choke. “No makes _us_ do anything.”

Those had been his last words before Lucifer had skewered him with his own blade. He hoped this conversation went better than that.

Samandriel’s shoulders started inching back into a less defensive posture. Then Raphael had to go and open his big fat mouth. He stared at them all in disbelief, as if they had appeared out of nowhere. “You are all…happy here. You enjoy this life.”

“So?”

“None of you care why our Father put us here. You don’t want to go back home.”

“ _This_ is home,” Gabriel insisted. “It’s not perfect, but I like not being stabbed by people I’m supposed to call family.”

Balthazar chimed in, “Being an angel had its perks, though I have to agree, I’m against the stabbing.”

“Don’t you want to know what is happening to the world? Who is in charge of Heaven? Which of our siblings live and which have passed?” When Raphael received no answer, he strode to the door. “I can’t sit here in contentment, whiling away the time as a human. I need to return to Heaven. With or without you.”

The door clicked closed. Not even a proper slam, Gabriel lamented. More like a pin dropping, only loud in the presence of so much nothing.

###

Samandriel buried his face in his hands, as if he needed more concealment than the room divider could offer him. He wanted to hate himself for saying those words. Months ago, he’d sworn never to mention it. He’d traded in that promise for what? In the hopes that they’d _understand_? To force them to become as disillusioned as he’d been?

There was a knock on the wall next to the room divider. Gabriel was nothing more than a silhouette. A human silhouette. “You wanna talk about it?” he asked.

“Look,” Samandriel answered, “it’s fine. You don’t have to play good big brother.”

“I’m not playing, kid. For once.” His shadow slid to the floor. “I just didn’t want you to think you were alone.”

Samandriel stared at his socks. “You were right, you know. About it being easier to be someone else. I understand now why you’d want to be Loki.”

“What? You getting the sudden taste for dramatic irony? That part was fun.”

“No, I meant…I understand why you’d want to…not be Gabriel.”

The air escaped Gabriel’s lungs, as if they didn’t have the fortitude to hold it in any longer. His throat ached. “Worst thing I could wish on anyone, and I’ve wished a lot of bad things on people. But seeing the gilding fall off of home, like peeling off a candy bar wrapper and ending up with a turd? Being stabbed hurt less.”

“There’s a word,” said Samandriel, “in Welsh. Hiraeth.”

“Wanting to go back to a home that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“And maybe never did.” Samandriel felt the word scarred across his skin and, after hearing his older brother speak, knew that those letters were carved into Gabriel’s very bones, over and over again, like a break that wouldn’t heal. “Heaven is like that.”

“Enochian doesn’t have a word like that,” answered Gabriel. “I guess we never thought we’d need one. The closest thing I can think of is _audcal qting_.”

“Rotten gold.” The phrase lacked weight in English. “When something that looks beautiful becomes terrible.” Most angels associated the term with Lucifer. Samandriel couldn’t help but think of Castiel, the good angel on a never-ending slippery slope, clawing his way up the rubble only to fall back down. Too much heart. Too many bad decisions fueled by good intentions. Samandriel’s own heart ached in memory of all his beautiful siblings who had been marred by war, plagued by choice, hollowed by pyrrhic victories. So weighed down, Samandriel moved almost crab-like, without ever fully standing up, over to where Gabriel was. The younger inched open the divider. Father above, even his words lumbered on his tongue as he tried to speak. “I want to be Alfie,” he whispered. “Maybe not forever, but for now.”

Gabriel’s smile was soft and understanding, and many things that had been beautiful about the Heaven the young ex-angel remembered. Perhaps his older brother had run away before the rot could infect it. “Sure thing,” Gabriel answered with a light nudge to his younger brother’s shoulder. “And if you ever get tired of saying my full name, I guess it would okay to call me Gabe once in a while.”

It wasn’t perfect, but it could work, thought Alfie. They could make it work. They didn’t need Heaven if they could figure out how to make this place a _home._


	6. An Angel Walks into a Pizzeria

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starting to pick up speed now. Thanks to everyone reading.

Raelyn released a strangled scream as paperwork flew off her desk in the cross-breeze. “Okay, I get that Raphael had a family emergency,” she vented, “but how am I supposed to run this place when my full-time barista up and quits?”

Gabriel tried not to seethe. Leaving to go find a way back to Heaven was one thing, but leaving Raelyn in the ditch without warning? _Dick move, bro. Real dick move._ “We’ll figure it out, Rae,” he said.

“It’s going to take forever to do interviews again. Oh my God. More interviews. More robots. Someone kill me.”

It would be a while before they could get anyone started, then longer before that person was trained, and Tabula Rasa was barely functioning as it was. Unless…Gabriel tapped a finger against his chin. “I might know someone looking for a job.”

###

A café hadn’t been the glamorous opportunity Balthazar had been hoping for, but he couldn’t open his own bar and lounge without significantly more startup cash than he possessed at the moment. “Good morning, _mon chéri_ ,” greeted Balthazar with a brazen smile.

“I like your friend already,” Raelyn stage-whispered to Gabriel. Her baker gave her a thumbs-up in turn, though she suspected it was immediately followed by a warning glance to the blonde Brit once she looked away. “So,” Raelyn said, “Angelo Balthazar? Interesting name.”

Gabriel tried not to snicker. _Angelo Balthazar_ had to be worse than _Gabriel Angelino_. Or _Raphael DeAngelo_ , which sounded like someone mixed up their ninja turtles.

“Most people call me Balthazar,” replied Gabriel’s brother smoothly. “I’d rather not be nicknamed Angel.”

“Fine by me,” said Raelyn. “Sounds more exotic anyway. You’re going to have to bring the nicknames up with Gabe, though. He’s the one who keeps changing all the nametags.”

As they walked away to conduct a more standard interview and talk paperwork, Gabriel gave Balthazar a firm good-luck pat on the back. He neglected to mention that his hand was covered in flour when he did so. With any luck, Raelyn wouldn’t mention it, and Balthazar would wear the handprint all the way home.

###

Alfie was 90% sure that this pizza job was going to kill him. There were minor burns on his arms from the ovens and his shoes were always sticky and his breaks were truncated more often than not. And that was before Naomi walked in.

Her suit was as crisp as a $50 bill straight off the press, and her bun was as unyielding as her rule over Heaven had been. She was a shark on legs, metaphorically speaking, although Alfie was sure that the sight of a literal shark on legs would have been less terrifying. His heartbeat was a war drum, and perspiration quickly gained ground across his skin as he dashed into the back room. His shift manager was less-than-pleased about this behavior.

“What are you doing?” she hissed. “We have customers! The lunch rush is on.”

“I can’t go out there,” gasped Alfie.

“Listen, if it’s an ex, I’m sorry, but you’re gonna have to suck it up.”

Alfie spat a few choice words inside his head. Working with teenagers had derailed his vocabulary. “It’s not an ex. It’s a really, really bad family relation that I can’t go into detail about.”

The words had the effect he was hoping for: the shift manager looked reasonably alarmed. “Which one?”

“Lady in the suit.”

“Okay.” She nodded. “I’ll go deal with her. You make pizzas.”

Alfie couldn’t remember the last time he was so nauseous. He had no idea if Naomi was still in charge of Heaven, or if she was an angel at all. With any luck, someone had stuck an angel blade through her and she was in the same boat as them. If he was less fortunate, then she’d caught on to their little band of reincarnated angels and was looking to do something about it. His hands shook as he tried to pull pizzas out of the oven. The plates seemed to have turned to lead in the last ten minutes. He nearly dropped one, but caught it at the last second, only for it to land on the ungloved part of his arm. The skin turned bright red.

“Okay,” said his manager. “So she’s staying here to eat, but she’s only in town on business, and—Alfie!” She’d spotted the new scorch mark, worse than they usually were.

Alfie felt his ears burn as badly as his arm when his coworkers turned to stare at him. Until today, he’d been Alfie the Unshakable. Bad customers? Weird orders? He could handle the worst of them with ease. The barest glimpse of Naomi, the woman who corralled Heaven and ordered him dead? The woman who beat obedience into angels with the slightest notion of free will? Perhaps humanity had turned him into the quaking Jello mold of himself he’d become. PTSD wasn’t unlikely either. He felt the panic of being rescued and condemned almost as fresh as the day Castiel pulled him out of Crowley’s lair.

“I think maybe you need to take a lunch break,” said the shift manager. “A _long_ lunch break. Get your bike, get out of here, and I’ll call you when she’s gone.”

Alfie had never fled work so fast. His fingers dialed the wrong number four times, the little bastards, which was shameful because Gabriel was on speed dial. When his older brother didn’t pick up, Alfie tore down the roads on his bicycle, aiming for Tabula Rasa.

Sweat was beading on his neck by the time he got there. The ride had turned him from Jello to something more along the consistency of undercooked cake. He ripped his helmet off, knowing that he’d look like a ruffled duckling, but not caring. It took longer than he would have liked to open the glass doors—mostly because they were pull doors and he’d been pushing.

“Hi, can I help you?” asked the woman at the counter, who must have been the owner if her bejeweled “Boss Lady” nametag was anything to go by.

“Sorry, but is Gabriel here?” he gasped despite his best efforts to breathe normally.

“Out in the back, working on scones,” she assured him. Her eyes wandered to the uniform partially obscured by his unzipped hoodie. “I get a feeling you’re not here on lunch delivery.”

“Can I please talk to Gabriel? It’s important.”

“Sure thing.” Raelyn leaned backwards and shouted over her shoulder, “Gabe! You’ve got someone here to talk to you. Says it’s important.”

Gabriel popped his head in around the doorway. “Alfie!” The name contained all the surprise of someone who had spotted a heavy metal band casually donning tiaras. He wiped his hands on his apron as he walked out front. Alfie’s face was strawberry-red and flour-white in uneven, alternating patches. Voice lilting with subtle notes of concern, Gabriel asked, “Hey, kiddo, what’s up?”

“Naomi’s here.”

Gabriel became very still, and very quiet, the way that wildlife did when a storm was on the horizon. Raelyn had rarely seen Gabriel without either a smirk or an exaggerated scowl. Deadly serious was not a good look on him. His face became older, his eyes positively ancient, and her first thought was _soldier._ He was ready for a fight. “Raelyn,” he said, “I need a minute.”

She was too dumbfounded by the sudden change to disagree. “You can go out back for some privacy. Looks like this is that kind of conversation.”

Gabriel all but took Alfie by the shoulders and steered him through the kitchen, out the back door, grabbing a “break-room” chair as an afterthought. Alfie hadn’t realized how exhausted he was until his older brother threw him into it. The scene felt almost like an interrogation, except for how various parts of Gabriel were smudged with multi-colored jams and chocolate. “Are you okay?” Gabriel demanded.

“She didn’t see me,” Alfie answered. The burn on his arm bit, but to acknowledge it would turn it from a simple burn to a screaming brand; _weak_ , it would declare. He shouldn’t have even been thinking about such a minor injury. In what most would call a nervous gesture, he tugged his sleeves down further, curling the battered hems between his fingertips and his palms. “I’m…okay.”

“You’re whiter than winter in Antarctica.”

Fifteen minutes after the encounter, and the panic hadn’t dissolved. It had stuck around in clumps, like added sugar at the bottom of a glass of iced tea, and Alfie would know, because he’d been told no less than three times by various Southern customers that “iced tea” could not be turned into “sweet tea” by dumping four packets of sugar into it. His mind wandered on this point, resisting his attempts to push it back to the issue at hand.

Gabriel crouched down to come eye-to-eye with him. “It’s fine to not be okay.”

In Heaven, _not okay_ meant the same as _useless._ His days in food service hadn’t particularly dissuaded him of the notion—they demanded that problems be dropped at the doorstep, on penalty of being reported to management for poor customer service. Alfie forced himself to remember the other night, the Sunday dinner that had ended with the door closing behind Raphael, when no one had been _okay_ , but they were _not okay_ together. “I don’t know if she’s still an angel or not. I don’t know if she found out about our new lives and came in search of us. She could be human now and this could be a coincidence. But I was…” –and here it was, the big word, crammed into six letters, one syllable, a shallow breath– “… _scared._ ”

Gabriel felt the overpowering need to smite a bitch, younger sister or not. As an archangel, he’d communicated with her, and knew of her callous tendencies. She couldn’t afford to express sympathy in a position that required her to destroy memories and keep Heaven obedient. Gabriel hadn’t thought much about it at the time, understanding that she was in place to prevent the creation of more Lucifers. It was crueler in hindsight. Left with a younger brother shaking in a cheap fold-up chair behind a bakery framed the issue in harsh lines and distorted angles.

“We’ve just got to lay low. And trust me, I’m an expert at laying low,” Gabriel assured Alfie. He wished he could have promised not to let Naomi hurt his younger brother, but in his current state, he knew that was beyond his capacity if she happened to retain her angelic abilities. “We can ward the apartment against angels. It needs a little decoration anyways. Too bland. We could make sigil throw pillows. How hard can needlepoint be?”

The image of Gabriel attempting to guide thread through cloth in the intricate patterns required of the anti-angel sigils helped soothe Alfie’s nerves. There was a plan. He could work with that.

“Thanks, Gabe,” he said. It was his first time using the nickname. What an odd experience it was. Gabriel smiled genuinely, though, so Alfie imagined he could get used to it in time.

“In the meantime,” Gabriel continued, “I’m getting a sharpie. Don’t worry, I won’t draw a dick on your face. Raph, maybe, if he comes back, but not you. Just going to put on a quick anti-tracking spell.”

Alfie supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised that Gabriel could create the sigils as efficiently as he did. His older brother had had plenty of practice after all, hiding from Heaven for as long as he did. Within minutes, Alfie possessed a brand-new sharpie tattoo, hidden on his upper bicep where it wasn’t likely to wash off. The Enochian appeared rather tribal in this context.

“C’mon,” said Gabriel, clapping Alfie’s shoulder as if to christen his handwork, “got a few danishes with a higher calling than sitting on that shelf.”

A small line of customers had formed in the time they were gone, but Raelyn indicated Alfie should grab the free table and stay as long as he needed to. Gabriel filched an apple danish from the shelf and covertly handed it off to his brother, promising Raelyn he’d pay for it later. She waved it off. “Get him some coffee, too, if he wants it. As soon as we get through these customers, alright?”

Raelyn and Gabriel had a system, developed over many lunch-rushes. They finished with the line before Alfie finished his pastry, and Gabriel recommended his favorite drink, which was non-coincidentally the sweetest one available. Alfie, flustered at the generosity, tried to turn it down, but Gabriel and Raelyn weren’t having any of it. Alfie took one sip and declared that he was going to get diabetes at this rate.

Raelyn bumped Gabriel’s shoulder. “I’m surprised Pillsbury here doesn’t already.”

“I’ve been better. Recently,” Gabriel defended. He had, in fact, noticed that a human metabolism meant that he would gain weight and grow ill by sticking to his usual proclivities. He was too good-looking to be fat, he decided in the end.

“So,” said Raelyn congenially, “how do you two know each other?”

“Rae,” replied Gabriel, spreading his arms to encompass the profoundness of the answer, “meet my much, much younger brother.”

Raelyn’s eyes widened. “Holy age-gap, Batman.”

Alfie smiled sheepishly. “That summarizes it well.”

“What?” whined Gabriel. “I can’t pass for a spry twenty-four?”

The answer was a resounding no. “Same father,” Alfie explained, which was not untrue, and allowed Raelyn to assume that they had different mothers. If that also left her with the impression that their father had some Hefner-like tendencies, well, it wasn’t uncalled for. “I live with Gabriel now, though.”

“And how’s _that_ working out?”

“Terrible,” complained Gabriel. “He makes sure I eat all my vegetables.”

Raelyn raised an eyebrow, the corner of her lips barely tilting up. “So,” she said, “the teenager is the responsible one here. I shouldn’t have expected any less.” She winked. “Good job.”

Alfie allowed himself to smile in return, surprising himself by the genuineness of his own expression. While the abject terror of running into Naomi hadn’t disappeared, he felt safer here, within the gently yellow confines of this bakery. Sure, he was going to go into a diabetic coma by breathing the air, and whatever drink Gabe made him would turn him into a hyperactive squirrel within the next ten minutes, but he could see that these aspects would slowly integrate themselves into his new definition of _home_.

It was a few minutes more, filled with banter and uneven influxes of customers and Gabriel casually switching out his nametag to read “Willy Wonka,” before Alfie’s phone chirped that he had a text.

“She’s gone,” he called to Gabriel. “Work just texted to tell me it was safe to return. Thank you, Gabriel, for…everything. And thank you, Raelyn. It was nice to meet you.”

“Come back soon,” she called.

“Be safe,” Gabriel added, although it made him feel _old_ and _responsible_ and all squishy on the inside. He didn’t think he’d ever told anyone to “be safe” before. Since when did he become a suburban mother warning her kids not to play in the street?

Once Alfie was gone, Raelyn turned to her employee in all seriousness. “He’s a sweet kid. You guys alright?”

The casual grin he’d been maintaining for Alfie faded into a somberness unbefitting of the Trickster. “We’ll be fine. I’ve got this.”

For the first time since Lucifer, and since millennia before that, Gabriel was engulfed by the burning determination of the archangel he was designed to be. Irony, the disloyal bitch, turned on its king and reminded him that he was a human, not an archangel. That wouldn’t stop him.


	7. Two Angels Walk Into A Library

The dive bar was obnoxiously flannel-oriented, which was Raphael’s first hint that it was a hunter bar. The light dripped, hazy yellow, out of metal fixtures dangling from the ceiling, more pretense than performance. Shadows caressed faces with gentle promises of relative anonymity. Raphael couldn’t lower his fashion standards to flannel, but his dark green jacket was an effective compromise. No one looked twice at you in here so long as you dressed for functionality and carried the edge of a person who had seen their fair share of blood. He sidled up to the bar and ordered whisky.

Since leaving five days ago, Raphael had killed two ghouls and a flock of fairies in search of signs from God. He’d happened across the ghouls while following accounts of people miraculously rising from the dead. It had not been as much of a miracle as Raphael had hoped. The fairies had been using Enochian to mark off their territory, believing that other creatures would retreat in fear of celestial wrath. That had not warded off a stray hunter, whom they’d managed to capture, and whom was infinitely grateful to Raphael for the liberation.

“I was ready to hunt angels,” the hunter had said, “not fairies. Goddamn _fairies_.”

“If you were outmatched by fairies,” replied Raphael, “I have to say you would have been grossly unprepared to deal with an angel.”

“Nah. Got this.” The man flashed a blindingly silver dagger. “Angel blade. Kills ‘em like _that._ ” He snapped his fingers to emphasize. “More than a few of them going around since they all started fightin’ each other. Buddy o’ mine sells ‘em. You got one?”

“I do not.” As much as it pained Raphael to admit it.

“Well, man! How did _you_ expect to deal with an angel if there was one here?”

Raphael brandished the spell-work he had painted onto a playing card in his own blood. Rough, though it would have done the trick. “Angel banishing spell.”

The hunter nodded his appraisal. “Nice artwork. You know what, though? Since you saved my life, I’ll get you one of these bad boys, on the house.”

Raphael had accepted the offer and the terms—that he meet the hunter, Beck, at this specific bar, in all its flannel-occupied glory. His new acquaintance arrived shortly after he did, carrying a wrapped box. “Hey, man,” Beck greeted, jovial as a mall Santa. His goatee and high cheekbones, however, made him look more like an overgrown elf in a bucket hat than Saint Nick. He slid the box casually over to Raphael. “Happy birthday.”

Raphael was halfway to stating that it was not his birthday when he realized that receiving such a package under any other circumstance might appear suspicious. He went along with it. “Thank you.”

“So,” said Beck, “you been huntin’ long? Seemed like you knew your way around the ropes.”

“I’ve been slaying monsters for some time, yes,” answered Raphael. Small talk. Boring. “I am attempting to uncover the current situation with the angels. Their feuds tend to come with collateral damage.”

“Wouldn’t know much about that,” admitted the elf-like hunter. “Lots o’ rumors, though. Heard they’re brawlin’ over leadership. Don’t know no names, don’t really care. Friend a mine said the Devil was back. Listen, though, you want angel crap, you gotta track down the Winchesters. They’re a bitch to find these days, though. Hell, I keep hearing they’re dead, and it seems that way for a while, then there they are again. I kinda wonder sometimes if it’s all a hoax, like Elvis.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.” And promptly toss it out the window. Raphael was _not_ going on a hunt for the Winchesters. He could list the reasons why very succinctly:

  1. He did not like them.
  2. They did not like him.
  3. If Castiel was alive and angelic, he was undoubtedly joined to them at the hip, and that was the one individual Raphael absolutely needed to avoid until he was at full strength. Afterward was another matter. Once he regained his status as an archangel, he would paint the walls with Castiel’s blood. This was the fantasy that lulled him to sleep at night.



“Hey,” Beck whispered, leaning in, “you mind if I see that sigil again? The one you were going to banish angels with?”

Withholding a groan of annoyance, because it was too undignified a sound, Raphael dug into his pocket for the card. He did not, however, allow Beck to breathe on it, much less touch it.

“That blood?” asked Beck.

“It needs to be blood or it won’t work.”

“Huh.”

Raphael eyed the remainder of his whisky. Taking it like a shot and running was gaining appeal. He actually considered it when someone called out Beck’s name and promptly sauntered over. This man looked more wolf-like than elf-like.

“Hey,” said the wolf-like man, examining the card, “I’ve seen something like that before. Thought it might have been witchcraft at first, ‘cause all these animals had been slaughtered in the area. Almost killed the guy wearing it. I guess if you’re a hunter, though, I couldn’t have been that far off.”

Raphael eyed the new man critically. “It’s a type of protection spell. Where have you seen it before?”

“Some fellow at the David City library,” was the answer.

That settled it. Raphael dropped the number for his burner phone on the table, chugged the whisky, grabbed the box, and hightailed it out of there.

###

Gabriel picked up two pizzas and his youngest brother from Peace-a-Pizza that afternoon. Alfie didn’t bother to protest. He threw his bike in the back and settled into shotgun, almost numb post-panic. Sigils drawn on freshly applied tape crisscrossed the interior of the car. Alfie’s eyes listed over them, their meanings trudging sluggishly into his mind. No angel was getting in here without being invited. _Safe._

Consciousness became a burden, growing heavier by the minute, and the lull of the car’s engine rumbled at him that he should drop it. His neck went slack against the window.

The next he was aware of, Gabriel was dredging him out of the fluid darkness where nothing hurt, its warm waves beckoning him back to it. “Sorry, kid,” said Gabriel, “you’re too big to carry now. You can sleep once we get inside.”

Alfie dragged himself out of the car, bones popping, muscles begging to be stretched. His feet made it clear that they wished to start a legal case over his regular abuse of them, and were trying to enlist his spine in the ordeal. His skin contemplated joining in, having been burnt by the ovens one too many times, and now unappreciative of the friction from his hoodie. He peeled it off the second they were inside.

“What did you do to your arm?” Gabriel demanded.

“Oven,” Alfie explained. Talking didn’t seem like a priority. Sleep seemed like a priority. He startled when Gabriel grabbed his shoulder

“Let me see it,” his older brother said. While Gabriel was by no means a mother-hen, he took exception to anything more serious than bumps and bruises as Alfie’s legal guardian. Something about not wanting to be accused of child endangerment. Alfie still wasn’t sure if he was joking about that or not.

“It’s fine,” Alfie assured. When Gabriel didn’t budge, Alfie offered up his arm. Resistance was futile. The faster they got the over with, the faster Alfie could go to sleep.

“It’s blistering,” Gabriel noted. He took hold of Alfie’s arm. “We need to—”

Whatever they needed to do went unspecified. A warm glow radiated out from Gabriel’s touch, licking at the burn until the skin stitched itself back together. They both gawked.

Then Gabriel shouted at the ceiling, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?!”

###

Raphael was not a man to act without conducting the proper research. He paroled the library parking lot in search of anyone who might currently be or have formerly been an angel. Their Father must have programmed some form of recognition into their skulls, because Raphael had recognized Gabriel without having ever encountered that vessel before. Surely enough, his brain _pinged_ at the sight of a short, gray-haired man lumbering into the building.

Intrigued, Raphael proceeded to stage two. After the angel had left, he hid angel warding beneath the library’s doormat. The next morning, he watched as the man strolled straight across it. An ex-angel, then, like Raphael. Assured that the man was nigh-powerless, and that Raphael would prevail should it come to a struggle, the former archangel laid in wait for the man’s shift to end.

He spent most of the time across the street with his laptop, abusing the wifi that accompanied his coffee and bagel. A spreadsheet contained all of the data he’d garnered over the last few months—natural phenomena, information garnered from the hunters, etc. It was his attempt to piece together a rough timeline of Heaven’s recent activity. Alfie’s rant reigned as the prime guideline for the time period before the boy’s death.

Thinking of the-angel-formerly-known-as-Samandriel under the name _Alfie_ left Raphael with an unexpected, hollow resentment. Gabriel had texted Raphael to announce the name change, shortly after he’d texted Raphael to tell his older brother off for being a dick. All texts went unanswered. Gabriel continued regardless. The insults had simply gotten more and more inane with the passage of time. Last night was _You suck more than a black hole._ Gabriel never asked for Raphael to come back. Raphael would have branded him a hypocrite had that been the case.

Raphael closed his eyes for a long moment and breathed out, as if in meditation. The project. He had to focus on the project.

Time ticked by until Raphael’s target tottered out of the building, just after five. Raphael shoved his laptop away and slid into the parking lot, obscuring himself until the last possible minute. Humanity had made the man fairly unobservant, it seemed.

“Hello, Metatron,” Raphael greeted, in a tone that was neither menacing nor amicable.

The gray-haired man almost threw his satchel at Raphael’s face in some misguided attempt at self-defense. Though his face lit with recognition seconds later, it did not light with brotherly love, or even relief. “Raphael!” Metatron acknowledged. “You’re…alive.”

“It would appear so. What a strange world this is.”

Raphael expected at least some shaking in Metatron’s boots. The Scribe of God had been on the lam for millennia, outrunning archangels seeking his knowledge. Initial surprise apart, though, Metatron remained steady. Exasperated, but not afraid. He offered the smallest of snide smiles. “Looks like our father’s putting all the Humpty Dumpties back together again. Short a few pieces.”

“What do you know about that?”

“I know I’m human and you, my friend, do not exactly carry a heavenly light about you. I have a warning charm. It didn’t go off.”

Raphael found Metatron’s irreverence grating. Fortunately, he’d built up no small amount of patience while working as a barista. He slapped on his neutral customer-service face. “I’d heard of someone implementing Enochian sigils and came to investigate.”

Metatron held up his wrist. A woven leather bracelet encircled it, each bead carved with the linguistic markings associated with angel-kind. _Protect. Alert. Obscure._ Raphael imagined that the largest charm, a smell metal plate, would grow noticeably warm should an angel come near. “Interesting accessory.”

“A hunter tried to kill me over it,” Metatron lamented. “He thought I was a warlock and kept ranting about dead animals and ritual sacrifices. The idiot couldn’t tell witchcraft apart from a rabid dog. ”

Raphael refrained from commenting on exactly how he’d found Metatron in the first place, though filed the information about the rabid dog away for later. Then, calmly, Raphael inquired, “Why are you hiding?”

“Because Heaven flew over the cuckoo’s nest a long time ago.” Metatron looked like he wanted to laugh, and only stopped because it would have been a dark, hysterical sound. “If you thought the apocalypse was a circus, trust me, that was just the opening act. You missed the show.”

“I heard that Naomi wrested control of Heaven.”

“Naomi? She’s _old_ news. Dead. I overthrew her myself. No, no, I mean the angels fell, our father bothered to show his face again, Auntie Amara broke free, _Lucifer_ was working with the _Winchesters._ I’m surprised the world is still standing.”

Raphael slowly dug his notebook out of his bag. “Metatron—”

“It’s Marv in public.” The man inclined his head toward a library patron passing by. “Metatron isn’t very low-key.”

Raphael almost snapped his pen in half. First _Alfie_ , now _Marv_. This kept getting more and more ridiculous. Deep breath. Customer service face. “Tell me everything.”

###

Not once in the four months Gabriel had worked at Tabula Rasa did Raelyn see him come into work and automatically down a beverage that was less than 70% sugar. “Here but for the grace of caffeine today, I see.”

His answering grin was downright disturbing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gabriel was brutally efficient that morning. The pre-open pastry duties were finished in record time. He was draining a second cup of under-sugared coffee when Balthazar walked in for his first day. The Brit whistled. “Chug, chug, chug,” he chanted with a sarcasm that was most likely inherent to his personality. “What? No sleep ‘til Brooklyn?”

“Burn in Hell,” Gabriel bit back, half exhausted vitriol, half pale banter. He flicked flour onto Balthazar’s new uniform shirt. The nametag had already been replaced with “Peter Pan.”

The atmosphere in the café was a curious cocktail of tension and amusement, amplified by a hint of hysteria. It was the way people got at the top of a daunting rollercoaster.

The morning, to Raelyn’s surprise, went smoothly. Balthazar powered through his training, Gabriel kept the shelves stocked, and no one snapped at a customer or vice versa. Around eleven, Gabriel became “Wendy,” in direct response to Balthazar’s earlier renaming. Alfie appeared just after one, in desperate need of a pick-me-up. Balthazar snuck in a quick shoulder-squeeze as he delivered a drink to the boy.

If Raelyn had asked, they would have all told her a story about a wild party in the apartment next to Gabriel’s. In truth, they’d spent most of the night angel-proofing the apartments to keep out anyone that wasn’t them, and then another few hours testing the bounds of Gabriel’s rejuvenated angelic abilities. He could heal and fly approximately two feet, which would reliably end in a crash landing. Bending time, matter, or reality were far out of his reach. Sleep and food remained necessary. Caffeine was beneficial, though he needed far more than usual to produce the same effect, as he’d learned at 5 AM.

It was all fine-ish until Gabriel accidentally flew headfirst into the industrial refrigerator by accident. _Whack._ If it weren’t for his scrap of Grace, he’d have died of a broken neck. Balthazar, the unsympathetic bastard, cracked up. “Heaven’s most dangerous weapon, indeed,” he said.

“Shut up,” Gabriel replied, rubbing his sore head. “I’m adjusting.”

“You might want to adjust faster if there are angels who think you’d be a thorn in their sides.”

“Look who’s talking, you impotent bastard.”

“Ouch,” whined Balthazar in mock hurt, a hand over his heart, “I’m wounded. I might die from your biting remarks…fledgling.”

He ran before Gabriel could throw anything at him.

###

Raphael stared _long_ and _hard_ at his constructed timeline. He then stared _long_ and _hard_ at the pile-up of texts from Gabriel. Part of him screamed that they were all traitors and had no need to know of what he had learned. The other part remembered reading _Harry Potter_ on Gabriel’s couch and Sunday dinners and Alfie’s look of sheer relief that his brothers wanted him back. Raphael’s stomach twisted in a disgustingly human manner as he dialed the numbers. The ring was very short.

“If this isn’t an apology,” answered Gabriel, “go screw yourself.”

“I discovered information you need to know.”

There was a long pause. “Fine. I’ll bite. Literally, if you’re trying to turn me into your sock puppet.”

“Brother, Heaven is worse off than we thought.”

###

“So let me get this straight,” said Gabriel, an hour later, Alfie now listening intently over speakerphone, “all the little birds in the nest got their wings clipped, Castiel has been on-and-off _God_ , Dad quit godhood to become some hack writer named Chuck Shurley, the Darkness got _loose_ , Lucifer and Castiel were bunk-buddies for at least a few months, and Michael has probably turned into a drooling nut-loaf down in the cage. Correct. Me. If. I’m. Wrong.”

“And your coma dream was a false reality created by Metatron.”

“Oh, right, and _that._ ”

“He said the character tended to act independent of his will, if it makes you feel better.”

“Nope.”

As “absolutely whacked out” as the events were (Gabriel’s words), Alfie couldn’t help but be relieved by the information that Naomi was as human as he was. It wasn’t her job to recall him to Heaven for a second termination.

Raphael went on, “I’ve created a timeline and a list of deceased angels. It…is a long list.”

“I’m starting to get the feeling Dad sent us down first so that we could babysit,” Gabriel grumbled.

“It’s not unlikely. Many of our siblings were at war with each other. They will hold vendettas. Castiel alone killed _hundreds_ after Balthazar and I. Including, as I learned, our very own Alfie.”

Alfie saw through Raphael within seconds. He wasn’t seeking vengeance on Alfie’s behalf—he was persuading Gabriel to his side, ensuring that the younger archangel wouldn’t stop him should Raphael ever get a chance to end Castiel. Exploiting Gabriel’s fondness for Alfie was merely a method.

“I told you it wasn’t his fault,” Alfie spat back. A thousand years ago, Raphael would have crushed him for taking up such a tone. There was no room for disobedient angels in Heaven. “Naomi was controlling him.”

“Was she controlling him when he stabbed Balthazar in the back? When he decided to absorb Purgatory? Committed genocide against the angels who disagreed? Smote many more in the name of rebellion?” If Raphael were the type to scoff audibly, he would have. “I’ve seen more loyalty from a tennis ball.”

“Castiel was fighting so that we could make our own choices.”

Tempers were rising. Gabriel tried to stomp out the ember of aggravation igniting in his chest.

Raphael, as monotonously condemning as always, replied to Aflie, “That doesn’t make his actions right.”

“He defied _God,_ and God brought him back from the dead, over and over again,” Alfie reasoned, albeit a bit over-emphatically. “If that’s not a sign that we are meant to have free will, I don’t know what is.”

No amount of stomping was putting Gabriel’s embers out. He realized too late he was a firecracker on a fuse. Burning, burning, burning. “You know what? Call me when you’re done squabbling.” He jolted across the room. A few steps may have been closer to flying than walking. Whatever. It was all he could do not to crush the door handle in his grip.

Raphael’s next words, tinny as they were over the phone, stopped him dead: “Running away again, little brother?”

“You. Effing. Bastard.” Gabriel’s fuse ran out. The whole world exploded in his head, lighting every inch in vibrant sparks, and it was so absolutely blinding. His skin burned. His breath heaved. His wings flared outward, casting predatory shadows across the back wall. The light bulbs overhead popped like gunshots.

“Gabriel!” Alfie shouted, trying and failing to grab his brother’s attention. Outside their window, the streetlights _pinged_ into darkness. The blackness seemed to scream, “Hey! Look! Angels this way!” Being found was the last thing Alfie wanted. He took the first course of action that came to mind—he slammed his finger down on “end call,” then ran headlong at Gabriel, tackling him to the ground, with the desperate hope that the impact would snap him out of it _without_ incinerating Alfie. He waited for the sting of carpet meeting flesh, or else the burn of Grace.

There was light. And pain.

For one second, Alfie had thought he’d been swallowed by the flare of Gabriel’s Grace. Dead again.

Then it passed and Alfie was able to separate out the sensations he felt. The burn was dirt and grass and rocks clawing into his skin as he and Gabriel tumbled off the side of a road. The light was a pair of headlights. Their owner honked as he passed them.

Alfie was still, miraculously, alive.

Looking to his side, Alfie saw that Gabriel had been rendered unconscious. _Perfect._ Alfie was really getting a handle on this sarcasm thing. Dirty, battered, and bruised, he burrowed into his pocket for his phone, glad it had survived the fall. He dialed Balthazar. “I need to ask you a favor. Can you pick us up at…”—he checked his map app—“…Route 28, near mile marker five? Yeah, I know that’s about twenty miles away. Gabriel flew us here by accident. He’s knocked out. I’ll explain later.”

Alfie settled in as comfortably as he could, his back against Gabriel, his eyelids peeled in vigilance. Crickets chirped. The grass began to grow cold. The air was that ethereal scent one could only call _night._ Alfie blinked repeatedly in an effort to shake the afterimages dancing across his retinas. For a moment—one glorious, terrifying moment back at the apartment—Alfie had glimpsed Gabriel’s wings.

It was going to be a rough wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking with this. If anyone catches a typo, feel free to drop a line. Any other comments also appreciated. Thanks.


	8. It'll Build Character

Alfie pictured the next three weeks this way: a long stretch of road that had suddenly and unexpectedly been condensed, leaving all of its street signs stacked up on top of one another. Gabriel refused to acknowledge that night for any period of time lasting more than five seconds. It scared him, explained Balthazar, like getting blackout drunk and waking up half-naked in an alleyway. Being Gabriel, his first instinct was to call it a fluke and move on.

“One time deal _,_ ” Gabriel had scoffed with a pseudo-smirk. “I mean, please, Raph and I got in worse scraps than that before. I’m not gonna sit on my ass and _brood_ ” —he drew out the word with multiple inflections crammed between the consonants— “like a freaking Winchester. Too busy for that. After all, it’s _wabbit_ season—and by _wabbits_ , I mean apartments. My contract is up soon. We’ve got to scout out a new one.”

Alfie found himself packed into the passenger seat of Gabriel’s clunking sedan early one morning, off to visit a new building with a two-room apartment on the market. Their options were a little more open now that Alfie had saved up enough to invest in a vehicle of his own—even if that vehicle happened to be a moped. Gabriel was obnoxiously exuberant on the drive over. Not that Alfie wasn’t excited about having his own room with an actual wall between him and Gabriel’s early morning kitchen fiascos, but Gabriel was over the top.

“Is this how he panics?” Aflie had asked Balthazar over the phone one day, while Gabriel was in the shower.

“I suppose it must be,” replied Balthazar. “When Michael and Lucifer were fighting, in the earlier days, he’d prank everyone else in Heaven, himself included, until either they laughed or had to save someone from a joke gone awry.” He paused. “He once enchanted a tree in the garden to ensnare anyone who walked by it. The branches could only be severed with an archangel’s blade. There were dozens of us in that tree by the end of the day, like the worst sleepover party imaginable. It took all four archangels to cut us loose.”

Balthazar was many things, but melancholy had never been one of them. Alfie supposed even runaway angels weren’t immune to fits of nostalgia. He had few memories of Gabriel before his older brother had packed up to leave Heaven for good. He supposed if he had, these manic phases would make more sense.

“We’re here!” sang Gabriel from the driver’s seat as they pulled up to the building. He all but sprinted out of the car while Alfie followed at a more human pace. The landlord had promised to meet them by the front entrance. Alfie felt like a child, dragging behind Gabe like this. What with their age difference, it probably looked that way, too. It irked him for reasons he couldn’t comprehend.

The first hint that something was wrong occurred accordingly: Gabriel shouted “Seriously?” and skidded to a halt, causing Alfie to slam into his back and rebound so hard that falling on his ass was a near miss. Once reoriented, Alfie peered from around his brother’s shoulders.

The problem quickly became evident.

Zachary Andelo, their prospective landlord, was none other than Zachariah. Though Alfie had only met the other on rare occasion, and never in this visage, the towering form with papery skin and wisps of white hair struck a chord in his memory. Zachariah pasted on a smile faker than a spray tan. “Gabriel. Samandriel,” he greeted, “What a splendid coincidence.”

Gabriel chose to be more blunt. “Cut the crap, Zach,” he sighed. “If you’re looking for someone who still has juice, it’s not me.”

Lie, Alfie thought. He suspected Gabriel didn’t want people trailing after him like lost puppies, hoping he’d lead them back home.

Zachariah deflated. “So you’re stuck in the mud, too, huh?”

Gabriel didn’t necessarily…hate Zachariah. He thought his younger brother was an underhanded, scheming SOB without a funny bone, and a vicious streak a mile long, but that went for most of Gabriel’s siblings, and occasionally Gabriel himself.

Gabriel would have gotten on his case about the brutal tactics he used to convince the Winchesters of his ways, except Gabriel had kind of killed Dean Winchester a hundred times over and then locked the brothers in TV Land for the same purpose. It was really just a difference of art style.

Man, Gabe was a douche. It had never bothered him before. It did now. Just a little. To answer Zachariah’s earlier question, Gabriel said, “Yep. Shish-kabobed by Luci.”

“I heard. Bartholomew told me.”

“Oh, Barry’s here?”

“Bartholomew, Uriel, Ishim. Networking is key.”

“You sound like a jackass when you say that.”

Zachariah scowled in response. The following conversation was very curt. Gabriel ended up turning down the apartment, because no way in hell was his little brother going to be his landlord, and was all but grinding his teeth by the time he and Alfie were approaching the car. “I hope that fulfills all your grandiose dreams of being upper management,” he whispered to Zachariah’s retreating back. Alfie chose not to comment. The car door slammed shut and Gabriel thrust his forehead against the steering wheel. Then he summarized the main concerns of the morning.

“There’s a second reincarnated angel camp,” Gabriel mumbled into the vinyl. “Except it’s like our rival camp, because all the angels there are the dickiest dicks. As opposed to mild-mannered dicks, such as yours-truly.”

“You had an alligator eat someone once.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t _unprompted_.”

Alfie rolled his eyes—an unfortunate habit he’d picked up from his coworkers. Gabriel wasn’t wrong about them all being, well, dicks. Power hungry and condescending, every last one of them. Alfie suspected Gabriel’s impressions were superficial—that his older brother had no idea how twisted they’d become in the absence of their father and two archangels, the power vacuum warping them into unfathomable shapes. Eventually, Alfie said, “You didn’t tell them about regaining your power.”

“Why? So they can crawl over each other trying to scrape their way back to divinity?” Gabriel’s face flashed with a second of rawness. It wasn’t unlike his last seconds against Lucifer, defending humanity, everything Gabriel was and wanted ripped open and put out there for his older brother’s viewing pleasure. But it was only a second. Then he smiled. “Nah. Let ‘em sit in the mud a while longer. It’ll build character.”

###

A quick description of Raphael’s phone: It was, in technicality, a smart phone, though its battery was terrible, its small screen had a minor crack in the corner, and the picture-quality was often grainy. The contacts list within contained well over a hundred names, all labeled “A” for angel or “H” for hunter. There was not a single “D” for demon. He killed any he encountered. It wouldn’t do to have them aware of his existence, least of all Crowley, whose life-or-death status remained ambiguous.

The contact for each former angel used their current name, in the event that one of his hunting associates ever caught sight of it and noticed an inexplicable spew of biblical names. Among the scores of once-dead angels, he acted as the lynchpin of communication—connecting some, keeping others apart, mediating when necessary.

Another face about his phone: It never stopped buzzing. He had text alerts left and right, calls, emails. Someone was always trying to get his attention. A bubble in the corner informed him that he had seven unread messages by the time he parked his car. He ignored them all and reached for the call button instead, then scrolled down to the G’s. Gabriel.

It rang straight through to voicemail.

Raphael had no idea why he bothered trying, despite the accurate assumption that all of his siblings in Brookings had issued a call-ban against him. It was growing increasingly annoying. He would text if he didn’t consider it surrendering. Children, all of them.

Through the windshield, rows of identical little houses glared back, each their own unique, garish color, like a suburban rainbow. Raphael climbed out of the car and headed towards the one labeled #17. He pressed the doorbell, and it chimed with such vigor as to be perfectly audible from the outside—one of those custom sounds that were supposed to be cute, or perhaps welcoming. It was up for debate.

Raphael scanned the area as he waited, as had become habit. There was nothing like mortality to make one paranoid. However, nothing leapt from the shadows in the time it took for the door to swing open.

The woman on the other side could be considered tall by female standards, with a rigid posture that spoke of making demands and having those demands complied with. Her make-up was neutral, though immaculately applied and well-maintained. Even her casual Saturday clothes seemed to consist of a nice button-up and dark-wash jeans, as if the very idea of wearing a T-shirt was offensive. And yet, for all that, Raphael couldn’t help but spend a second too long focusing on her socks.

They were plain white socks. There was nothing special about them. Not even a hole. The fact of that matter was that he hadn’t ever pictured Naomi, adjuster of wayward angels, in _sock feet._ It was too…unimposing. He shook himself out of his fixation to ask, “You wanted to talk?”

“I want to help,” she corrected, stepping aside to allow him in. The kitchen smelled like a medley of spices. Curry, mostly. “I heard about the angel network you’ve been building and wanted to talk to you face-to-face.”

“Isn’t that what Skype is for?” Raphael replied dryly.

She paused, every muscle in her body going completely still, before it broke into a bewildered huff of air. “That was the most surreal experience I’ve had all day. Raphael, archangel, talking about Skype.”

“I use every tool at my disposal, as I always have,” he replied with his usual coolness. He would not admit that it unnerved him sometimes as well. After all, he had been perturbed by her socks not five minute ago. “How do you think you could help?”

“Up front?” Naomi asked. “I’ve gained some connections through my employers. I could help the reborn find work and homes.”

“What is your job, exactly?”

“Human Resources consultant,” she replied, her tone dryer than a desert. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Wouldn’t you need a certain amount of qualification to perform in that position?”

“I woke up to a pile of documents. One of them was a diploma, and the other was a résumé for places I’m certain are code for Heaven. I started low on the totem pole, but Heaven must have been truly great work experience, along with the endless nights of studying, because I worked my way up fast. What can I say? I get things done. Besides, it’s certainly less dangerous working with disgruntled staff than soldiers with knifes and grudges, though there are still rebels making power plays.”

Raphael mulled over her offer. “I know of a number of our brothers and sisters in search of employment.” It could be a stopgap solution to solving the larger problems at hand. More so, it would endear his siblings back to his side. “I would appreciate your assistance.”

“Then can I offer a little more assistance?”

“Such as?”

“I know you’ve been recording the names and locations of our found siblings, but have you also been investigating the feuds?”

“I have some notes on them.”

Naomi nodded, almost to herself. “It might benefit you to pay close attention to them. Draw a territory map, perhaps. Heaven was shattered before we ended up here and there are still a number of sharp edges among us.”

Raphael recalled Alfie’s panicked tone over the phone, the knowledge that Naomi had ordered Alfie’s death, and how defensive Gabriel had gotten at the mention of Naomi’s name. He suspected that was a very sharp edge. Raphael claimed, “I’m trying to unite the host.”

“And I think that is noble, but inciting fights this early on will not bring unity.” The corners of her lips turned downward into the kind of frown women worried about getting wrinkles from. Her gaze drifted to the dining table, clad in a tablecloth that was more checkered and cheery than Raphael had expected Naomi’s taste would be. “It’s different now. The genie’s out of the bottle. We can’t tell our siblings to follow orders and expect them to do it unquestioningly. We can’t change their memories or squash their sentiments—all of which backfired in the end. It’s going to come down to forgiving the ones we can and ousting the ones we cannot.”

“I know,” answered Raphael. There were times he wished he didn’t know so well. He thought again of Alfie, who had once been so loyal as to be invisible—who now felt so betrayed by Heaven and Naomi that the idea of returning to the host had become a nightmare. “Do you regret what we, the archangels, asked you to do?”

“We had to keep Heaven in order,” replied Naomi. “We were desperate. I knew that. But we were meant to stop evil and protect humanity, and instead we nearly lobotomized our siblings and slaughtered hundreds of humans in our wake.” She herself had murdered an entire Sanderson’s restaurant in order to reign Castiel back into her command.

At the time, she’d thought them inferior creatures, expendable. Now, she found herself fixed on the table cloth in the living room, and the memory of the day it got there. She cleared her throat. “I live with a…roommate now. Her name is Irene. She would have been ashes on the wind if we’d had our way the first time around. I want to help you rebuild our family. But Raphael, I don’t want another apocalypse.”

“I’m not planning one,” he assured her. “As you said: it is different now. All I want to do is stop the fighting.”

“Good,” Naomi sighed, smiling ever-so-gently at the tiny squares patterned across the tablecloth. Raphael was beginning to suspect she hadn’t been the one to pick it out. “Human-kind is starting to grow on me.”

“Then in the interest of keeping the peace,” Raphael replied, “I recommend avoiding Brookings, South Dakota, because I think Gabriel might well and truly smite you, grace or not, if you come near Samandriel.”

Her expression was grim. “I did what I had to. Samandriel was compromised.”

“Which is why I’m warning you that Gabriel is not going to see it that way.” Raphael stepped forward, breaching the invisible barrier defined as “arm’s reach.” His neutral expression made Naomi uncertain if the gesture was in compassion or threat, but she knew that could be made clear in a matter of seconds. “What’s more,” he continued, “if you choose to ignore that warning, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to stop any unpleasantness that comes of it.”

“I understand.”

He hesitated then, the hard line of his mouth wavering, and Naomi was taken aback by what he said next: “You did your job. It is not your fault that your job put you in the path of resentment. Being a leader is no easy task. In time, others will understand that.”

It was as close to a pat on the back and an A-for-effort as Naomi was ever going to receive. She held her chin high. “Thank you.”

Raphael did not say “You’re welcome,” nor did he offer much else after that. He collected her contact information and established a way to reach her if their siblings were searching for employment. Their discussion included a list of those who she did not believe should be directed her way if Raphael wished to avoid fights. All in all, it went smoothly, and Raphael exited the house with a slice of banana bread that Naomi’s “roommate” had made.

By the time he shut the door to his car, his unread message count had climbed up to thirteen. If Raphael had been anyone else, he might have groaned and slammed his head against the wheel. Instead, he very responsibly checked them for any priority-one issues. Amongst the names, one stuck out.

Metatron had not contacted him since their reunion at the library and, as such, Rapahel felt a mild tingle of alarm when a text message from him appeared. Raphael clicked it open with a frown. It contained the five startling words: _Chuck wrote a new chapter._

###

Several tours later, Gabriel and Alfie did agree on a condo that was gloriously uninfected by angels, unless one counted Balthazar, who lived a few doors down and received more than his fair share of noise complaints.

“Oh, look,” Balthazar had teased, sarcastic as ever, “it’s like we have a _nest_.”

Gabriel promptly rearranged most of Balthazar’s furniture to be relatively nest-like. Blankets and pillows tangled together over two couches he’d pushed seat-to-seat, creating high walls with a cushy center. Balthazar swore with creativity.

“But it’s so comfy!” Gabriel protested. He sat snuggled in the middle of it with a cup of hot chocolate.

“You’re too big to be a fledgling,” Balthazar replied. “Get out.”

Gabriel yanked Alfie into the pile. “You can’t evict me. I’ve got a baby bird.”

In a rare moment of savagery, Aflie responded, “I’m sure Raelyn will think it’s _adorable_ when I walk into Tabula Rasa and start calling you Mama Bird. Maybe Mama Gabe. What do you think, Balthazar?”

“Mama Gabe, definitely.”

“I will glitter-bomb the hell out of you both,” Gabriel threatened casually before pulling Balthazar down and holding him against his will, cheating with just a smidge of angel strength. The nest was not big enough to fit all three of them, which led to much squawking and flailing, but that was half the fun of it. Melodramatically, all three thought, _This is what a family should look like._ None of them spoke it aloud.

Such an intricate thing to build.

Such a fragile thing to break.

###

All it took was one call from the hospital. Gabriel didn’t pick up at first, figuring that Raphael might have changed numbers to deceive him—and he wasn’t letting _anyone_ trick the Trickster. The ringing droned on and on, though, threatening to continue into infinity. Even Raph wasn’t that persistent. Gabriel picked up as his shift drew to a close. “Yello,” he greeted, not without some measure of attitude.

“Hello,” greeted a very formal voice on the other end, in a clipped tone that never foretold anything pleasant. “I’m calling from Brookings Hospital. We received a patient who listed this number as his emergency contact. Are you Gabriel Angelino?”

Gabriel went through sixty internal profanities in as many microseconds. He cut her off sharply. “I’m Gabriel, yeah. It’s not Alfie, is it? Alfredo Angelino?”

“No. The patient we have is listed as—sorry, this name is a little tricky—Kay-steel Angelino Winchester?”

Gabriel’s heart sunk. “Spelled C-a-s-t-i-e-l?”

“That’s it. He was admitted with a shallow stab wound and blood loss, though the doctors say he is recuperating well. We can’t discharge him without the supervision of a friend or family member.”

At the mention of a stab-wound, the long-healed scar on Gabriel’s abdomen twinged. He didn’t spend much time wondering how Dad determined who would end up with scars and who would not, or how severe each would be. It was irrelevant. “I’ll be right there.”

As Gabriel put the phone down, he sensed Balthazar’s eyes boring holes into the side of his skull. The blonde was leaning against the doorframe, trying so hard to appear nonchalant that it was painful. “Please don’t tell me I heard what I thought I just heard.”

“Depends on what you heard,” said Gabriel as he snatched his coat from the rack.

“Castiel.” Balthzar squinted with disapproval. “He’s here.”

“Technically, he’s in the hospital.”

“You’re going to get him.”

“Yes.”

It was like watching a light drizzle erupt into a monsoon. Anger. Fear. Betrayal. “He _killed_ me, his friend, for tattling. He slaughtered half of the angels. And if Metatron is to be believed, he went off the deep end some time ago and has been splashing around in it ever since.”

“Then this will be a glorious opportunity for you to chew him out for it.” Gabriel kept his shoulders straight. Balthazar was throwing stones, but hell if Gabriel was going to flinch. “I can’t just leave him there, Balthazar. Psycho or not.”

“What if it was Lucifer?” That rock hit hard enough to bruise. Balthazar could smell blood and continued, relentless. “Would you still go?”

Gabriel pushed past him without another word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the kudos and likes, guys. I'm hoping to have this all wrapped up before the new season starts on October 12.


	9. To Wax Bohemian Rhapsodic

Walking into the hospital was a steaming heap of déjà vu. The last time Gabriel had been here, he’d been a coma patient, fresh to the constraints of mortal life. The sterile white halls reminded him too much of Heaven. He fought off the shiver down his spine as a nurse led him to his brother’s room.

Even from the doorway, Gabriel could tell Castiel was high as hell on pain meds. His head lolled and he watched the wall like it was a television screen. Gabriel approached with his hands in his pockets, casual as could be, somewhat concerned that any other demeanor could set Castiel off. “What brings you to this part of town, _bro_?”

Castiel continued staring at the wall.

“I said, _heeeeey_.” Gabriel stepped into his direct line of sight and flailed his arms for emphasis. Castiel blinked in slow motion. Okay. Recognition. Gabriel could work with that. “Cas? _Castiel_?

Gabriel was content to ignore how the nurse had tacked “Winchester” onto the end of his brother’s name for now. Either he’d missed a happy announcement, or Dad was taking a shot at the ridiculous codependence Gabriel had seen budding during their time together. It wasn’t the issue right now.

Castiel’s eyes became slits and his head tilted to the side. “Whose reality are we in?” he questioned.

“The run-of-the-mill one,” Gabriel answered. He recalled at the last minute that Metatron had thrown Castiel into a warped reality that involved a shadow of Gabriel. Another story for another day. To Castiel, he clarified, “Cassie, I’m not dead.”

“You said that last time, but it was a lie. Chuck said you were dead and that he couldn’t ‘pop’ archangels back into existence.”

“It wasn’t popping so much as a three-month-long coma,” Gabriel admitted. “Trust me, kid, you and I are going to have a long conversation when you are sober. I heard you went all _Shutter Island_. Yeah. We’ll have to talk about that.”

“I’m not going to fall for this!” Castiel shouted, seemingly at thin air. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, I will find whatever hole you crawled out of and raze it to the ground.”

Gabriel was definitely getting the crazy vibe now. “Cas, what’s the last thing you remember?”

“I was stabbed. With an angel blade.”

“Which would make you…?”

“Dead. Again.” Poor thing almost went cross-eyed thinking so hard. They must have had him on the _good_ stuff. “Is this where angels go when they die? It seems…unorthodox.”

Gabriel settled on the side of the bed. Might as well have fun with this while he could. “Yep. Great big hospital in the sky.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Gabriel looked upward as if praying for patience, though he wasn’t much in the habit of praying these days. “Castiel?”

“Mm?”

“You’re not dead.” Gabriel ruffled his brother’s hair. There wasn’t a startling difference when he was through—Angel of Perpetual Bedhead would have been more befitting than Angel of Thursday.

Come to think of it, today was a Thursday. Gabriel was 90% sure this was the godly version of a Dad Joke.

“Am I dreaming?” Castiel wondered, surveying his surrounding anew, as if to wonder what effed-up part of his subconscious had created this scenario. He resembled a distrustful kitten, ready to bat at the strangeness to see how it reacted, or else tear it to pieces. Gabriel held back a bemused frown. It was a terrible struggle imagining this doofus as the scourge of angel-kind.

“You’re not dreaming, nimrod,” Gabriel assured him. “I’m alive, too. Dad’s been Lazarus-ing our asses left and right. Gotta say, not a lot of ‘em are happy with _you._ ”

“I don’t imagine so.” Bitter reality was at war with the loopy juice in Castiel’s system. He scrubbed a hand over his face—the one unattached to the IV. Sleep beckoned with her siren song. “I screwed up. Badly.”

“At least you admit it. I think that’s step one of the twelve step plan. Not really sure that AA solutions apply here, but it’s worth a shot.”

“…You’re really alive?”

Forget the Lance of Michael—those big sad baby blues were clearly Heaven’s deadliest weapon. Damn. Gabriel swallowed the lump in his throat, all with a practiced joviality that was, nonetheless, paper-thin. “And kicking.”

Castiel launched himself forward. Gabriel had about half a second to predict _attack,_ then another half processing _hug._ The embrace was slack and imbalanced and ultimately imperfect. Castiel almost fell off the bed attempting it. Gabriel had to resist the urge to snap and make all his brother’s pain disappear. He went for a weak laugh and a firm pat on the back instead. “Okay, love you, too, bro. You know you’re gonna have to let me go if you want me to sign your discharge papers, right?”

There was no answer. Gabriel glanced down. Castiel had fallen asleep.

Gabriel raised an eyebrow high in challenge. “Psycho killer, huh? _Qu'est-ce que c'est?_ ”

###

It was arranged ahead of time that Raphael would meet Metatron in downtown David City, and they could discuss the newest chapter of Chuck’s autobiography over drinks at some bar Metatron insisted was such a hole-in-the-wall that no one would bother them.

Neon lights in David City had a penchant for flickering eerily, never new enough to function as a whole, and so it was that Raphael found himself standing under dancing shades of acid green. He checked his phone. No calls. No text. No sign of Metatron.

Had he, Raphael, former archangel, bringer of divine providence, knower of things otherwise unknown, been _blown off?_

As if the very thought of an irate Raphael was terrifying, his phone began to buzz violently. _Marv,_ announced his Caller ID. This name still made his lips twist with unpleasantness, but he couldn’t run the risk of anyone snatching his phone and finding it full of dead angels. Forcing himself to use his best customer service voice again, because Metatron had information Raphael needed, he answered, “Having trouble finding a parking space?”

A grinding snarl greeted him, alongside the noise of metal being torn asunder. “Tell me you have a gun!” Metatron pleaded, shouting to be heard over it.

“What is that? Where are you?

“The parking lot on Foundry. It’s some kind of dog, and I’m not talking your friendly neighborhood Fido.”

“I’ll be there in two minutes.”

Raphael took off at a sprint, removing his handgun from the interior pocket of his jacket at he went. Another pocket produced a round of silver-coated bullets. He slowed down just enough to load them. The situation in the lot was audible before it was visible. Screeching metal. Shattered glass. Raphael dashed around the corner, aimed at the shadowy creature, and fired without hesitation.

He missed the first shot. The second as well. The third connected, and once the gunshot stopped ringing in his ears, he could make out the pitiful whines of an animal in pain. It managed to run into the dark before Raphael could catch a good look. Convinced they were safe for the moment, he strolled over to what used to be a gray sedan. Metatron toppled out of it, sporting bright red cuts from the smashed windshield, though nothing that would leave him bleeding out.

“What _was_ that?” Metatron hissed.

“You had a better view than I did,” Raphael argued. He considered what he saw. “If I had to narrow it down to three possibilities, I would suggest that it was either a skinwalker, a witch’s familiar, or a Black Dog.”

Metatron aimed his gaze skyward, where once there were answers, but now there were none. “I need a drink.”

“Then I suppose it is convenient we were meeting at a bar.”

###

Gabriel was an idiot. All it took was a maelstrom of papers and cute nurses, centered around the assuredness that Castiel was _asleep,_ for his younger brother to escape his room. He was caught at reception, before much real harm could be done, and wheeled back. He’d had delusions that he could pass as healthy enough to get past the front doors, the way spectacularly high people had delusions of passing as sober. The harsh reality was that his skin had gone the color of chalk and his gait was less straight than Ellen DeGeneres.

“What were you thinking?” Gabriel snapped at the human being doing his best imitation of a crumpled paper ball.

“Saving you,” Castiel replied, a little too slowly. Gabriel had to make several “go on” motions before his brother bothered elaborating. “You said others were back. They’ll be angry. Maybe even murderous. I don’t want you caught in the crossfire.”

“It’s not your job to protect me,” Gabriel reminded him. “I make my own damn decisions. The second I got that phone call, I _decided_ I was going to come and get you, and here I am.” He held his arms akimbo and spun on the spot, as if that would make his presence more apparent. “I’m not going to pretend you didn’t mess up, because you did, royally, but like hell am I gonna let you wander out there, alone, healing from a _stab wound,_ to get slaughtered and/or maimed over a grudge, like this is the frickin’ French Revolution. Got that, Queen Cassie?”

“But—”

“No buts.” Gabriel raised both his eyebrows, hands on his hips, and was starkly reminded of the early days of Heaven, when Gabriel’s ankles seemed to be constantly swamped by little balls of light. God, Castiel had needed a child leash—one that could wrangle a wavelength of celestial intent. Gabriel’s face softened. “Look, I’m sure you want to get back to your little _ménage à trois_ with the Winchesters,” he said, enjoying the deadpan glare he received for the comment, “but you’re not waiting for them on the side of the road, got it?”

“Yeah,” Castiel grumbled. “I got it.”

Gabriel patted him on the head patronizingly. “Great. Then let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

###

Raphael read his father’s autobiography front to back, then read the latest chapter twice. It was a reflection on family. _I taught a young child how to read,_ he wrote, _and then expected that child to give me a full report on an eight-hundred-page book with advanced vocabulary._ He debated the pros and cons of being a helicopter parent against the pros and cons of being a hands-off parent. The former was exhausting and the latter was both chaotic and cruel. _They’re too old for their Dad now. All my words and apologies would ring empty, but it would be worse not to make them at all._

“So our new lives are an apology,” Raphael acknowledged, fingers tracing the last line over. He quelled the disappointment that he wasn’t needed for a grander purpose. Their Father had thought he could revive them as humans and they would be content—that it would absolve some of the damage caused by his abandonment.

“Not what you thought?” asked Metatron, picking distractedly at one of his freshly-applied bandages, as though Raphael’s opinion was incidental.

Raphael set the pages down. “I thought there would be purpose _._ ”

“Chuck hasn’t done purpose in a long time.”

 _Chuck._ Another strange alter-ego, though Raphael suspected it was beginning to make sense. Evidently, their Father had a penchant for odd nicknames. Chuck. Alfie. Marv. Or perhaps it was hereditary, or maybe learned. Raphael was starkly reminded of Gabriel imitating their father’s finger-snap gesture to conjure or transport instantaneously.

The sound had grated on Raphael’s nerves for eons. Snap, snap, snap, echoing across the universe. It was later that Lucifer picked it up, and only to cause devastation—to show that he could end lives with literally the snap of his fingers. Raphael fought back memories of Castiel, high on the power of souls and warped by the intentions of Leviathans. _You’d let the demon go,_ Raphael had asked, _but not your own brother?_ And Castiel had raised his hand, slowly, and snapped. Everything had gone red, then black, before settling on the sterile white of a hospital room.

“This can’t be all there is,” Raphael insisted. “Life as a human? Flawed? So consumed by basic needs that we ignore the bigger picture?”

Metatron’s face contorted with pity, as if Raphael was no more than a dumb child, despite the fact that he had been far older and wiser—that he remembered Metatron practicing sloppy Enochian letters in the sand and on cliffs.

Metatron replied, “If there’s one thing I know, it’s that Chuck loves humanity. I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought we were all better off this way. The angels were supposed to be protectors, and yet we _perpetually_ destroyed whatever we touched.”

“It could be a test,” said Raphael, clinging to that last shred of hope to regain his former glory. Bargaining was the third stage of grief, was it not? “It’s possible he will return powers to those he deems as worthy.”

“And what do you think makes someone worthy?”

“Fidelity, discipline, ambition. What else is there?”

Metatron rolled his eyes. It was like Raphael hadn’t heard a single word he said. His eyes strayed to a word on the page below him—a word that appeared repeatedly, like being bludgeoned with a rock, but that Raphael seemed to overlook every single time. Metatron had caught it in the _Supernatural_ books, too, but at the time wrote it off as the piss-poor vocabulary range of a hack writer. The word was not _fidelity_ or _discipline_ or _ambition._ The word was _protect_.

Metatron began packing up the pages, since Raphael was gleaning nothing from them. “On another topic,” he said, because at this point there were _only_ other topics, “what are we going to do about that _thing?_ ”

“Kill it,” Raphael replied without hesitation. “If it’s not already dead. I will look for any other sightings. In the meantime, I suggest investing in a gun.”

###

Alfie could have sworn that time had been moving slower since Gabriel called to let him know Castiel was back. With a minor stab wound, to boot, which was a greater injury than their Father had left the rest of them, Gabriel’s coma aside. “I have to go get him,” Gabriel had insisted. “Look, I know you said you didn’t blame him for what happened, but I can stay with him at a motel tonight.”

“No, it’s fine,” Alfie had assured, despite the tangle of nerves taking up residence in his stomach. “I can’t say I don’t blame him and then avoid him like the plague.”

After that conversation, Alfie had immediately begun a mental rehearsal of what he’d say. It was a fine line between too casual and too weepy. There was a short moment when he wondered if he should have accepted Gabriel’s offer to relocate after all. It suddenly terrified him just how many of his reincarnated siblings were going to feed an unbridled hatred of the man residing at their apartment tonight.

The clock ticked down to the end of Alfie’s shift. He was out of time.

###

Raphael was settling into the nearest motel, fresh from giving Metatron an armed escort home, when his phone buzzed unrepentantly, disregarding his sour mood and multitude of questions. He swore to Father, if this was a damn telemarketer—

It was Beck, the hunter who had traded over Raphael’s current angel blade as gratitude for saving his life. Raphael sighed. Customer service voice. “Hello, Beck.”

“Hey, Raphael,” greeted the other end, drawing out every syllable of his name. “So, listen, I’m on a ghost case at a mental hospital, and it looks simple enough, but there’s some Enochian up here on the walls. Mind if I send you a picture? See if you could translate it?”

“Send it over,” Raphael instructed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks a bunch! You know, I just don’t want to get caught with my pants down, thinking I’m dealing with a ghost when there’s worse crap going down.”

 _Bzzt._ Photo. Raphael opened it up. He squinted, not understanding at first, before he realized some words had been purposefully misspelled. The message finally clicked. Oh, hell no. Raphael was not prepared to deal with this. He would have crushed the phone in his hand had his strength been anything greater than human.

The text read, in its nearest Enochian-to-English translation, _Lucifer Wuz Here._

The mysterious dog attacks would have to wait. He dialed Beck back immediately. “Tell me where you are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where things are going to really start picking up. As always, thanks for sticking with me. And if you noticed any typos, please point them out, because typos are like mosquitoes and need to be firmly squished.
> 
> -H


	10. Gimme Shelter

Gabriel allowed Castiel the illusion of mobile independence, while his reflexes twitched to catch his brother should he keel over. As they shambled out of the elevator, into the second floor hallway, Gabriel found himself staring steadfastly at Balthazar’s door, as if he could will it to stay shut. To his relief, the door didn’t budge. They entered Gabriel’s apartment without incident.

Not everything had been unpacked yet, leading to a wide array of boxes stacked in odd formations and half-concealed angel wards that required invitations to bypass the threshold. The duffel bag over Gabriel’s shoulder—retrieved from the motel Castiel had allegedly been staying at before his injury—made a nice addition to the havoc. Despite the fact that the coatrack was fully operation, Castiel seemed unwilling to part with the trench coat that had also resided in the motel room. _Kid loves his coat,_ thought Gabriel. It must have been a kind of security blanket.

“Thank you,” said Castiel quietly, “for…this.”

“No prob, bro,” Gabriel answered. He hefted the take-out bag onto the counter, pulling out three double-burgers, an ass-load of fries, and milkshakes. Nutritious? No. Delicious? Yes. “Eat up, donut.”

Castiel tilted his head to the side. “Donut? Is that a reference?”

Gabriel smiled in a manner that would have been described as menacing by anyone who had grown up with him, but as merely mischievous by the population at large. “’Cause you both got holes in you.”

The kitty-cat head-tilt morphed into a glare.

“What?” asked Gabriel. “Too soon?”

“I believe the phrase is ‘asshat.’”

“Since when did you learn to swear?”

“I keep company with hunters and this isn’t the first time I’ve been human. It would be more surprising if I didn’t know.”

“Good to know the Brothers Grim and Grimmer did something right.” Gabriel plummeted onto the other couch cushion, throwing his feet up on the table. In between bites of burger, he texted Alfie, who would be on his way back any minute. _Cas is here,_ he wrote. _He seems mostly sane._

Alfie responded a minute later, _I’m in the parking lot. Warn him?_

Gabriel took a loud, emboldening slurp of milkshake before turning to his younger brother, who had demolished his burger in record time. Impressive. “Hey, Castiel,” said Gabriel, at the crossroads between casual and careful. Crap. He wasn’t good at this _compassionate_ stuff. “Remember in the car how I mentioned that Samandriel-now-Alfie lives with me?”

Castiel went very, very still. “Is he here?”

“Almost.” Gabriel got ready to pin his brother to the ground if needed. “Here’s the deal: He knows Naomi pulled the trigger, not you. He’s not mad.”

“He should be,” Castiel protested. “It was my job to save him. I should have been able to resist Naomi, but I was too weak.”

“Naomi was damn good at her job. She didn’t get to the top by half-assing anything. I’ve seen her work. There was nothing you could do.”

“…I snapped out of it when she asked me to kill Dean. Dean, but not Alfie.”

Gabriel could have smothered himself with a pillow. “That’s different. We all know you and Prince Flannel have a thing, and Sleeping Beauty only wakes up for true-love’s kiss.”

“Gabriel, we’re not—”

“Dad changed your last name to Winchester.” This was a very important development that needed to be mentioned. Gabriel pointedly waggled his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me I missed the wedding.”

“There was not a wedding, this is not a fairytale, I am not a princess, please stop.”

“Spoilsport,” Gabriel lamented. He heard a knock. It was unlikely Alfie had forgotten his keys, and infinitely more likely that he was trying to give Castiel warning of the impending conversation. Gabriel popped off the couch to answer it regardless.

What he did not expect was for a blitzed Balthazar to charge in. Red with the flush of alcohol, though not unsteadied by it, he made a beeline toward Castiel. Before Gabriel could so much as open his mouth, Balthazar had decked the trench-coated ex-angel across the jaw solidly enough that Gabriel fretted they’d have to visit the hospital twice in one day.

Woah, woah, woah!” Gabriel cried, running to intercept. He locked his arms around Balthazar’s middle to restrain him. “This isn’t UFC.”

“You killed me!” Balthazar shouted at Castiel, so loudly that a noise complaint was inevitable. And possibly a call to the police, given the subject matter. “I was trying to save you from your own cosmically idiotic plan and you _stabbed me in the back_.”

Castiel regarded him with regret, visible in the droop of his eyes if not the set of his bruising jaw. “I was trying to save the world,” he said. “It was war and you were a double-agent. You stabbed me in the back first.”

“Not _literally._ ” He jerked forward against Gabriel’s hold. “And what about your human friends? You didn’t kill them. No, you choose them over and over again. The second you met the Winchesters, it was to hell with the rest of us!”

“Funny,” replied Castiel, the edges of anger cutting through the surface, “they say much the same about all of you.”

“We were your family.”

There it was—the boiling point. Leave it to an angel to break at the word _family_. Castiel lurched forward. “We never had a family,” he growled. “We had an army. We called each other brothers as soldiers would. We were only ever as loved as we were useful. But Sam and Dean never stopped caring about me the second I had nothing to offer them. _That_ is family.”

The vitriol was too reminiscent of Lucifer and Michael. Gabriel’s stomach contents started vying for a place in his throat. His feet itched to run. Why did it always come to this? Two brothers, convinced that the other was a traitor. Balthazar was feverish with anguish, and Castiel...

Castiel was what happened when you took a fine silver chain and stuffed it at the bottom of a pocket for too long—it twisted and tangled and knotted until it was unrecognizable and irreversible.

“Stop!” Gabriel begged. He could feel the heat of his Grace threatening to spill over. “See, this is why I left in the first place. This right here. How our family never fails to turn against itself; to turn our brothers and sisters into our enemies. Don’t you even remember the days when you two used to play tag all across the galaxy? Or that time when you tried to take a star home, and Lucifer didn’t have the heart to tell you to put it back, so he put a new one there and hoped Dad wouldn’t notice? You were both freaking _inconsolable_ when it finally fizzled out.” He stared them both dead in the eyes. “I miss those kids.”

The fire in the atmosphere had spluttered halfway through the speech, and was all but dead by those final words. Gabriel let Balthazar go. The younger made no move to resume his violent rampage.

“Now I hate to say this,” said Gabriel, “but as the oldest, I’m calling timeout. Balthazar, go to your room. Castiel, sit the hell down. Neither of you talk to each other until you think you can manage a civil conversation about where you both went wrong. Understood?”

Gabriel didn’t miss this part of babysitting his siblings. Thankfully, both were too sobered to offer resistance. Balthazar strode out the door. Castiel resumed his inhabitation of the couch, eyes fixed on his socks.

Gabriel was about to shut the door when he saw Alfie slumped on the other side of it, evidently waiting out the fight. There was a wordless exchange of sympathy as expressed by a long glance. Then Gabriel helped Alfie to his feet, pulled him inside, and thrust his dinner into his hands. Castiel was halfway to standing to give a proper apology, and had managed “Alfie, I’m sor—” when Gabriel leveled him with a glare.

“You,” commanded the archangel. “Sit.”

Castiel dropped like a rock.

“It’s fine,” Alfie said, sitting cross-legged on the other side of the table. His voice was calm. Mature. “I know it wasn’t your fault. Naomi’s control was very…thorough. I’m not angry.”

Castiel accepted this with a very sad, very grown-up little smile.

Gabriel wished for his fledglings back.

###

That night, Raphael drank more caffeine than was reasonable, in the interest of arriving at the mental health facility by daybreak. He crammed in a few hours of sleep before meeting with his hunting acquaintance. Beck had a fake Fed ID that let him move fairly freely throughout the building. He wrote Raphael on as a consultant. Raphael had given his “professional opinion” that the Enochian on the walls looked like some kind of sloppy Devil-summoning worship, but that he wanted to speak whoever had put them there.

“Oh,” said the nurse, scrunching her nose at the wall graffiti, “that’s just Lucien. He’s a recent admission.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Thinks he’s the Devil.”

“Is there any way I could talk to him?”

“Do you think he has a link to your case?”

Raphael was a quick liar for a former angel. “I’ve seen those symbols as part of cult activity before. If possible, I’d like to identify which one, to see if he has something to do with an ongoing case.”

“Alright. Wait here.” The nurse vanished down the hall.

Beck nudged Raphael’s arm with a smirk. “Pretty smooth, and you clean up nice.”

Raphael had a talent for making cheap suits look expensive. He adjusted the collar primly. “Thank you. If you don’t mind, I don’t need you here for this part.”

“You were so hyped up about it. I’m kind of curious.”

“Let me rephrase,” said Raphael, his voice dropping three octaves into a territory that could be referred to as threatening. “I would _appreciate_ it if you would go.”

“Whoa, chill, okay,” drawled Beck. He raised his hands in surrender. “You got beef with this Lucien guy?”

“If it’s who I believe it is? You have no idea.”

Beck beat a hasty retreat as the nurse reappeared. “He’s in his room,” she said. “Follow me.”

A moment of doubt beat at Raphael’s head with a hammer. Was he truly prepared to see Lucifer? Scratch that. Was he truly prepared to deal with Lucifer’s obnoxious attitude? They reached the door.

The man sprawled out across the bed backwards, feet on the pillow, head hanging upside down off the edge. Draped loosely around him, the hospital’s white uniform was a sterile white, and obscured any musculature to the degree that the man appeared more like a boy wearing an older brother’s hand-me-downs. Any spectators might have been deceived by an air of helpless innocence. Raphael knew better. His knife-like aura itself screamed of familiarity. The angled face, dusky blond hair, and cutting blue eyes begged for both fear and love. Father had programmed this face into Raphael’s brain.

“Lucifer.”

“Excuse me?” said the nurse. “Mr. DeAngelo, I have to insist you call patients by their proper names.”

Meanwhile, every molecule in the patient’s body came alive, his expression lighting up with unholy glee as his true name was spoken. He spotted Raphael. The grin became shark-like. “Raphy.” He leapt to his feet. “Back from the dead. Long time no see.”

The nurse did not appreciate being ignored. “I wasn’t aware you knew each other.”

“Oh,” Lucifer purred, “since _forever._ Me and Raphy here go way back to when we were teeny-tiny, don’t we?”

“Yes,” confirmed Raphael, through a thin, professional smile almost as dangerous as his older brother’s. “Forgive me Nurse Herrera, _Lucifer_ is simply a childhood nickname.”

“Right, right,” agreed Lucifer mockingly. He held up his wrist. “My pretty paper bracelet says I have to be _Lucien Engel_ now.”

She stared like she was considering jabbing sedatives into the both of them. It might not have been unwarranted. “I believe Mr. DeAngelo had some questions to ask you about your wall art, Lucian.”

Lucifer lit up like a satanic kid on Christmas. “Do you like it?” he asked Raphael. “I mean, I’m no Banksi, but there’s only so much you can do with smuggled crayons.”

“Nurse,” said Raphael, “do you mind if I speak to Lucian alone for a minute?”

“I’m sorry, but I have to insist on supervision. Lucian has limited in-person visitation rights.”

Raphael cast a look of judgment upon his brother.

“I threatened to smite someone,” Lucifer admitted in a stage whisper, cupping a hand next to his mouth as if it would prevent Nurse Herrera from hearing him—or, more likely, because he suspected his blatant lack of repentance would bother her. “Imagine my shock when it didn’t work. On the bright side, the drugs here are _superb._ Sedatives would have been a _blessing_ in Hell.”

“How are you here?”

“Well, _that’s_ fuzzier than a Build-a-Bear Workshop, but I’m 90% sure Daddy pulled me out of where I was, drained me like a battery, and called the cops on my crazy ass, who threw me in here. Then I moseyed on down to art therapy and guess who’s there but big bro Michael. Still nearly catatonic, bee-tee-dubs.”

“Michael is here,” Raphael repeated. He spared a fleeting, exhausted glance at the ceiling. “Of course.”

“Except _he’s_ allowed visitors,” Lucifer pouted directly at Nurse Herrera.

“Michael didn’t try to smite anyone,” Herrera reminded him, “and he doesn’t claim to be the Devil.”

“Because Michael doesn’t _talk,_ ” Lucifer reminded her. It was like watching a bulb blow when the switch was flicked. _Boom._ He held his glare for a solid ten seconds before flipping back to amicable, as if the whole exchange had never happened. “So, Raphy, what’ve you been up to? Get any other interesting visits lately?” The question would have sounded casual to anyone else, but Raphael saw the tightening skin around Lucifer’s eyes and the way his shoulders were held rigid in the mimicry of a casual shrug. Lucifer pressed on, “Maybe baby Gabey?”

Raphael would have laughed at anyone who claimed that Lucifer even knew what guilt _was,_ and yet Raphael couldn’t give another name to the flicker of emotion that kept Lucifer’s smile so forced. “Why do you ask?”

Lucifer shrugged. “Curiosity.” He began a slow circle of the room, more predatory than your average pacing, but pacing nonetheless. His arms swung by his sides, vying for pockets that weren’t there, and not knowing what to do otherwise. “Say hi for me, will you?”

“I’ll pass on your regards if I see him.”

There was only so much that could be said under supervision, without Raphael sounding insane enough to qualify for treatment. It did, however, make for fairly civil conversation. There was no specific end-date for Lucifer’s stay at the hospital, nor Michael’s. Their release was pending on consideration that they were stable enough to reenter society. Raphael would give it two weeks. Lucifer was always good at weaseling his way out of tight corners. His newfound humanity didn’t necessarily make him unthreatening.

Raphael traced the edges of his phone with his fingertips, a disgustingly human habit he couldn’t rid himself of. A visceral desire to withhold this new information from Gabriel in revenge for their petty feud warred with the cold logic that leaving Gabriel in the dark out of spite was not an action his Father would deem _worthy,_ should this experience be a test after all. If it was not a test, then at least being the mediator between all the former archangels gave him some semblance of control.

The one concession he would make for his vindictive side was that if Gabriel was not going to pick up the phone, Raphael was going to visit him in person, because a text wouldn’t do this justice. Raphael needed to see first-hand Gabriel’s absolute dread at having Lucifer back in the picture. He packed up his belongings for the drive back to Brookings.

###

Gabriel had all but thrown Castiel in the shower after dinner, with the explanation, “Human smell, human cleaning rituals, them’s the rules.” Conveniently, this also allowed Gabriel and Alfie some conversational privacy. “You doing alright?” the older asked.

“I’m fine, but I need to talk to you,” Alfie responded. He glanced at the bathroom door to assure himself that Castiel wasn’t about to interrupt. The roar of the shower offered enough noise to cover his voice. Regardless, Alfie spoke quietly. “You didn’t heal Castiel like you healed me.”

“In case you haven’t noticed,” Gabriel said, louder but still discreet, “I’m trying to keep the angel mojo on the down-low.”

“He has a stab wound.”

“Alfie, let me tell you what will happen if I heal Castiel.” Gabriel wrangled his facial muscles into an expression of seriousness. It was almost painful to keep his lips from twitching upward; to keep the jokes at a minimum. “He will go back to Sam and Dean. He will tell them that there’s an archangel hanging around. Then, in a month, Thing One and Thing Two will be knocking at my door, with their passionate speeches about ‘doing the right thing,’ and they will drag me back into the fight.” Gabriel collapsed into his chair. “It’s not that I don’t care about the guy, okay? I just know what’s going to happen if we reintroduce an archangel to the party, even one as handicapped as me.”

Alfie had to concede the point. “Dean Winchester did seem…uh…intrepid when I met him. I’m surprised Castiel hasn’t called them yet.”

“Ten bucks says he screwed up,” responded Gabriel, unconcerned. “I’m sure he’s planning the mushiest-gushiest apology his little heart can manage. He’ll call them by the end of the night.”

“What about Balthazar?”

“What about him?”

“You don’t think he’ll call Raphael to help extract revenge?”

The very idea bowled Gabriel over. “He wouldn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“They were friends all their lives.”

“Until they betrayed each other in one of the worst ways imaginable,” Alfie reminded him. “I know you want to protect Castiel, but it’s safer if he’s out of here as soon as possible.”

Gabriel tried to deny it. He wanted to pretend it wasn’t that bad. They could get through this. There were apologies and hugs on the horizon—except that was exactly what he had thought when Michael and Lucifer began fighting. Gabriel had a tendency to overestimate people’s ability to forgive.

“Okay,” agreed Gabriel, “I’ll give Cas a push.”

When the water squealed to a stop—and Castiel emerged in flannel pajama bottoms so plaid that Gabriel strained not to make any jokes about how the Winchesters had rubbed off on him—Gabriel plucked his dark-haired brother’s phone off the table and waved it at him. “Why haven’t you called your friends?” he asked. Receiving an owlish blink in response, Gabriel plowed on, “Not that I don’t like having you around, but last I checked, you pretty much had a hand in Dean-bean’s back pocket.”

And, wow, thought Gabriel, it was astounding how quickly Castiel could transition from space-cadet to defense-mode. Almost faster than Gabriel could snap his fingers. “I was going to call soon,” Castiel deflected gruffly. “It’s just…complicated.”

Complicated. _Uh-huh._

“Castiel, you awkward tater-tot,” Gabriel groaned as if he was speaking profanities, “Call. Your. Friends.”

He held the phone out for Castiel to take. When Castiel further hesitated, Gabriel decided it was time to resort to desperate measures, which equated to dialing Dean himself and holding the device up to Castiel’s ear. _Why,_ Gabriel asked his Father as the phone rang, _are all of my brothers such dumbasses?_ Sometimes Castiel’s social ineptitude pained him. The pain worsened as the other end of the line clicked open and Castiel remained silent, gaping like a panicked fish. More nudging was needed.

“If you don’t answer,” Gabriel threatened in a whisper, “I will.”

Castiel was quick on the draw after that. “Hello, Dean.”

 _There we go._ Gabriel shoved the phone into Castiel’s hands.

“Cas?” Dean breathed like this was a miracle—which it was.

A hard swallow worked its way down Castiel’s esophagus, like choking down rocks, though he was told his voice normally sounded like he’d been gargling gravel, so maybe Dean wouldn’t notice. “I seem to be…alive. Again,” Castiel explained. “I woke up in a hospital as a human. Dean, I’m sorry I—”

“No apology needed, man,” Dean said. “I’m just glad to have you back. I thought you were gone for good this time. Thank…well, Chuck, probably, I guess. He’s usually the one who brings you back.”

“I suspect as much,” Castiel agreed, thinking of the strange ID he’d woken up with. “I’m in Brookings, South Dakota.”

“South Dakota? Awesome.” Castiel heard some clicking. “Looks like you’re about an hour away from Jody. I’ll call her, you can crash at her place tonight, and then we can pick you up tomorrow.”

“Actually,” said Castiel, “there’s no need to worry. I have somewhere to stay for the night.”

“Are you sure?”

“Reasonably.”

“Alright, I think we should be in town before dinner tomorrow. We’ll call when we’re getting closer and you can tell us where to pick you up.” There was a long, breathless silence on the phone. Castiel could practically hear Dean grinning. “I’m seriously glad to have you back. The bunker’s been so friggin’ empty. Can’t wait for you to come home again, buddy.”

Home. It was nice to know Castiel hadn’t screwed up irreparably. He felt his mouth twist into a smile most would have referred to as dopey. “Me, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plan is still to have this wrapped up prior to October 12th, so Supernatural can't obliterate my own personal continuity mid-story.
> 
> As always, thanks!


	11. Laughter Lines

Gabriel knew about signs: burning bushes, water to blood, all that. His first batch of muffins coming out extra crispy was an omen of impending disaster.

Though Balthazar showed up to work, he avoided his brother whenever possible. Dark circles made him appear zombie-like, and the rattle of an ibuprofen bottle sounded every few hours. Gabriel gave six attempts at talking to him before surrendering to Balthazar’s melancholy. The customers sensed the gloom like they might a faintly rotting odor. One told Balthazar directly to “buck up” because no one wanted to get their midday treat from a “grumpy Gus.” If Balthazar had retained his powers, he might have considered erasing that particular human from existence.

None of that was the impending doom Gabriel’s muffins had tried warning him about. No, doom strolled in at around 2 o’clock in a crisp white button-up, slacks, and a vest that screamed he was too classy for any establishment whose chairs didn’t match, such as this one. Doom’s name was Raphael, and Gabriel knew his brother well enough to see the menacing grin hidden behind his cool façade. “Hello, brother,” Raphael greeted. “I noticed you changed living accommodations. I tried to visit.”

“Like I want you knowing where I live,” Gabriel snapped half-heartedly. Thank Dad he’d moved. If Raphael had discovered that Castiel was in town, well, Gabriel had the sinking feeling he would have come home to find his walls repainted a vivid red. The minor panic brought out Gabriel’s snider side. Call it a defense mechanism. Call it suicidal. Either way, he was tempted to fish one of the burnt muffins out of the trash and chuck it at his older brother’s face. “Why are you here?”

“You won’t answer my calls.” His dark eyes strayed to Balthazar, who donned his perpetual sarcastic smirk in place of expressing any clear emotion. Even Raphael could tell it was a thinner mask than usual. “I see you’ve taken my position. Enjoying the apron?”

“Oh, immensely,” Balthazar responded. “If this was Who Wore It Better, I believe I’d have won.” A pair of elderly ladies walked in and stole his attention before he worked up his next cutting remark.

“Unless you’re here to apologize your ass off,” said Gabriel, “we’re a little busy now, so you can steer your persistent caboose out that door, Little Engine That Could. In fact, roll back down the hill where you came from.”

“Is that anyway to talk to a paying customer?” Raphael threw down three dollars. “Medium coffee. Black.” He glanced pointedly at the ladies Balthazar was assisting. “And look at that. There’s a wait.”

 _Smarmy bastard,_ Gabriel fumed within the privacy of his own mind. He snatched up a Styrofoam cup and scribbled the order on the side. Raphael took exception to this.

“Let me make sure it’s right,” he said, grabbing both the cup and the sharpie, despite Gabriel’s cries of, “Hey, employees only back here.” He noted that, in his petty mood, Gabriel had purposefully spelled his name wrong: _Rafaelle._ With nary a roll of his eyes, Raphael crossed it out, spelled his name correctly, then wrote neatly underneath it, _Lucifer and Michael are out._ Honestly. Did they have to resort to acting like grade-schoolers, passing notes in class? Gabriel read it with forced indifference.

Picking up another sharpie, Gabriel replied, _Pics or it didn’t happen._

Raphael snapped out his phone and displayed the stealth-video he’d stolen of Lucifer on his way out the door, when he’d been pretending to make a phone call, but had actually just been holding the phone up to his ear with the camera pointed in Lucifer’s general direction. In that time, Lucifer had taken to tearing out magazine pages and folding them into origami.

Raphael waited for the fireworks. Lucifer had killed Gabriel. The horror should be imminent.

Disappointingly, Gabriel just scoffed, “Of course he’s in the psych ward. I bet he’s loving the drugs.”

“He assumed you were alive after he saw me,” Raphael pushed. “It’s only a matter of time before he charms his way out of there.”

“Raph, what are you doing?”

“Why, conveying important information.”

“No, you’re being an instigative bastard,” Gabriel hissed, low enough that the folks taking their seats couldn’t hear. But this wasn’t a whispering kind of conversation. He motioned Raphael to the back room. “Did you really come to my job in the middle of the day just to start a fight?”

“I thought you might appreciate the news is all,” Raphael responded. His tone remained deceptively level. “Aren’t you the one always preaching forgiveness? I know you’re no hypocrite. You wouldn’t vehemently protect Castiel despite the fact that he brutally smote me, and Alfie, and Balthazar, then turn around and refuse the same amnesty to Lucifer for your own murder. In fact, I’ll make it easier for you.” Raphael dug a small piece of paper out of his pocket. “Here’s the number for the ward. All you have to do is ask for Lucien Engel. You could ask for Michael, too, I suppose, although I heard he doesn’t speak much these days.”

Gabriel accepted the note with a wry smile. “Thanks.”

“What are brothers for?”

“Usually, love and support, but I’ve known for a while that isn’t your thing.”

Raphael took no notice of the jibe. “I suggest next time, you pick up the phone.”

“Get out before I throw a crispy muffin at you.”

The weak threat warmed Raphael’s chest the way a compliment might for nicer people. Those who were threatened were those with power. Raphael had a hand to play. To say he was gleeful would be an overstatement, though he did exit the back room with an air of confidence. In contrast, Balthazar was a walking storm cloud, sparking with far too much anxiety as he handed over Raphael’s coffee. The writing on the cup had been altered. In Balthazar’s own hand, no less.

_Castiel is at Gabriel’s apartment._

There was an address underneath.

Raphael managed to work up a pleasant smile and a nod as he accepted the offering. “Thank you, brother.”

This much good fortune, thought Rapahel, had to be a sign from God.

###

It wasn’t until three o’clock, when the shop was dead and Gabriel was taking off his apron, that Balthazar bothered addressing his brother.

“Is Castiel gone yet?”

“Why?” asked Gabriel. “You wanna chat or are you going to punch him in the face again?”

“Don’t treat me like I’m some weepy teenager screaming over a bad break-up,” spat Balthazar. He focused on the pattern of the countertop, as if the grain might impart some wisdom unto him. “I know it was war. This isn’t about not being able to forgive Castiel. It’s about not being able to trust him.”

“Yeah, well, pretty sure that’s a two way street right now.”

Balthazar had forgotten how vehemently Gabriel hated taking sides. Unfortunately, it was the world he had been thrust into. Balthazar huffed out a thin, pathetic sound. “He’s different, Gabe.”

“We’re all different,” Gabriel retorted, as if Balthazar was indeed the moody adolescent he had described earlier. “Believe it or not, I know you rug-rats are all grown up.”

“There’s a difference between grown-up and _Total Recall_.” Balthazar’s hands clenched around the edge of the countertop. “I don’t know that man crashing on your couch.”

“Someone’s feeling a little dramatic today.”

“Gabriel, listen to me, dammit!” Balthazar slammed his hands against the polished wood. “He’s a loose cannon. Heaven took the angel with the biggest heart and stuffed him into the uniform of the most effective soldier, and when they lost their leash on him, he _broke._ Do you know how terrifying it is to be in the same room as someone who will do whatever it takes to get what they want? Who will take a pyrrhic victory over no victory? Who is so blind to the fact that he’s become what he hates? He’s practically…”

Gabriel’s wit lost some of its razor edge in the face of such bald distress. “Practically what?”

“Never mind.”

“No,” said Gabriel, coming to lean on the counter next to Balthazar, “practically _what_? Practically Lucifer?”

“Yes!” Balthazar felt like an elastic snapping. “You didn’t see it, but Raphael and Castiel were Michael and Lucifer all over again. Castiel was so desperate to win, and he didn’t care how low he had to sink to do it.”

“So what? You want to lock him in Hell and throw away the key? Just in case he becomes Satan the sequel?” No answer. Gabriel lowered his voice. “Balthazar, I’m going to drop some knowledge on you here: No one survives a war without getting muddy. Sometimes all the choices suck.”

“What do you suggest, then? Forgive and forget? Pretend everything is sunshine and daisies?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you do, just don’t barge into my apartment to start fights, because I don’t want to lose another brother if there’s any chance I don’t _have to_.” Gabriel grabbed his bag and headed for the door. “You wanted to save him once. Don’t tell me you don’t care.”

How stupid he’d been, thought Gabriel later, not to see that Balthazar had been trying to explain in advance for the chaos he’d unleashed.

###

“Yes, Sam,” Castiel sighed, “I packed a toothbrush, though I fail to see how that is the ‘most important’ question, as you pointed out.”

Sam laughed on the other side of the phone. Apparently, something about the question or response had been funny. Castiel was 80% good with human interactions. The other 20% were like this.

“Okay, well, we’ll be there soon,” Sam replied. “You sure this is the right address?”

“Yes. I’ll be waiting outside.”

“See you then.”

Castiel did one final sweep of the apartment for anything he might have looked over, but it seemed all he was missing was closure. He would have liked to say goodbye to Gabriel and Alfie again; to his brothers who could somehow gaze upon him and not see a monster. He wished he had the right words for Balthazar to soothe the open wounds between them. Hard as he tried, they refused to piece themselves together. He suspected there was no amount of _I’m sorry_ that would heal Balthazar’s fear and disgust of what Castiel had made himself.

Castiel heaved his duffel bag onto his shoulder, straightened his trench coat, and left all the could-have-beens behind.

The day was cold with mid-winter chill. For the first time in a long time, Castiel shivered. He reached into his coat pockets for the gloves Chuck had deposited there. The promise of the Impala’s internal heating kept him from disparaging too strongly. He closed his eyes, fighting against the fatigue that shadowed humanity’s every step despite every attempt to fend it off. Gabriel had teased him about being so well acquainted with caffeine already, and Castiel had explained his time at the Gas ‘n’ Sip as “Steve,” compiled with every other time he’d been human or near-enough.

It could be said that the lethargy and the cold had dulled Castiel’s senses, or that he’d grown naïvely comfortable in Gabriel’s presence. Either would have explained why his alertness had slipped until both of his arms were pinned. His eyes snapped open.

His right arm was held by Ishim, his former commander turned traitor. His left was immobilized by Rachel, his former lieutenant whose crime had been curiosity. In the dead center, stiff with superiority, stood Raphael. All angels whom Castiel had slaughtered for one reason or another.

“Hello, Castiel,” Raphael greeted, his voice a deep rumble, not unlike a lion’s purr. “Fancy meeting you here.”

Castiel refused to struggle. “Raphael. Ishim. Rachel.”

“You’re not so tough without your back-up, are you?” asked Ishim.

Rachel kept her jaw locked and her eyes forward.

“Are you here for revenge?” Castiel asked them.

“Revenge isn’t the word I would use,” said Raphael. “Revenge seems petty. Rather, we are of the mind that you would be best kept out of the way.”

Raphael nodded to Ishim, who slammed Castiel’s head back into the brick with just enough force to disorient. He could have pushed harder. Castiel knew that. A quick glance at Rachel showed her discomfort about the situation, yet also her determination to go through with whatever plan they had cooked up.

“I’m human now, too, you ass,” Castiel spat. “What could I possibly do that would concern you?”

“You always find a way.” Raphael stalked closer until he was inches from Castiel. From this distance, Castiel could smell coffee and traces of body odor, both marking him undeniably as human. Paper cuts decorated his hands, which Castiel saw as Raphael placed his palm against Castiel’s forehead as if to smite him. “I underestimated you once,” said Raphael. “We all did. No one will make that mistake again.”

Raphael shoved back. Castiel’s world tumbled into darkness.

###

Gabriel did his best to shake off the negativity lingering after his conversation with Balthazar, but it had glued itself inside of him. He tested his best Trickster smile in the mirror. It came out wan.

Being a responsible older brother sucked. He longed for the carefree lifestyle he’d enjoyed as Loki. At this rate, his beautiful honey-brown hair was going to be fully gray within the month. He took the turn into the apartment building a little sharper than usual, then immediately had to slam on the breaks.

Raphael. Raphael with Castiel, the older evidently beating the younger into unconsciousness. Gabriel jolted out of the car without bothering to park. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, diving into the fray.

“You’re home early,” Raphael noted. He hadn’t yet released Castiel. “I’m delivering a warning. I urge you not to interfere. After all, you’re outnumbered.”

“I’m so gonna call the cops on your ass,” Gabriel threatened. “Let Castiel go.”

“Gabriel,” Rachel spoke up, for the first time since arriving, “you don’t understand. Castiel is not who you think he is. He’s a traitor, a murderer, a thief, and a monster. He will ruin any chance we have at rebuilding.”

“Like all of you aren’t?” Gabriel asked. “It’s not like any of us ever cringed at a little bloodshed.”

“Death doesn’t erase all crimes,” Ishim insisted. “His or ours. This is our fight, not yours.”

“Like I’m going to let you turn him into a freaking vegetable?” Gabriel growled. “No.”

“Gabriel,” Raphael called, “as much as you wish forgiveness for everyone, you must realize it’s unrealistic. It didn’t work with Michael and Lucifer and it won’t work now. I suggest you do what you did the first time: Leave.”

The syllables fell like matches, each kindling a fire until it roared. The heat pressed against the edges of Gabriel’s vessel. It was the final trick he had up his sleeve. Raphael thought Gabriel was outmatched only because Raphael thought Gabriel was still entirely human. The youngest archangel focused. He had one shot at this.

Gabriel bulleted forward, grabbed Castiel around the waist, and spread his wings. The joints ached and Castiel was dead weight in his arms, but he’d been the fastest angel in Heaven once. They were gone before Raphael could so much as blink.

Gabriel flew as far as he could, until he faltered and fell, sending them sprawling across a long stretch of highway, Castiel folded in as safe as was achievable given the situation. Gabriel could have sworn he felt something in his chest snap as they hit. “Ouch,” he moaned. He imagined Castiel would utter the same had he been conscious. A concussion and stitches wouldn’t have taken that rollercoaster well. Gabriel tried to focus long enough to determine if they were remotely in the realm of okay. His equilibrium was having none of it. The world spun with the force of the impact, combined with the sheer exhaustion of flying so long on newly restored wings in a body not meant for such feats.

Essentially, he was dead tired. And injured.

Beside him, Castiel blinked into a state resembling awareness, however dulled it was. “Gabriel?” he muttered.

“I’m here,” Gabriel coughed out. His throat was the texture of sandpaper. “We’re safe. Well, saf _er_.”

“S’m ’n’ Dean,” Castiel griped, which Gabriel translated as “Sam and Dean.” Castiel outturned his pockets attempting to retrieve his phone. “Have to call them.” It took three attempts to get the number right—quite the feat, considering they were on speed dial.

“Cas?” asked Sam. “Hey, we’re almost there.”

“Don’t,” Castiel coughed. “Ambush.”

“What?! Are you okay?”

“Mostly.” Castiel spared a glance toward Gabriel, who appeared to be hovering above unconsciousness. “Gabriel saved me.”

“He’s alive?”

Dean’s demands to know who was alive came across loud and clear over the phone, all of which Sam ignored. Castiel replied, “It’s a long story.”

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, I’ll track your phone. Sit tight.”

Castiel felt Gabriel tug at his sleeve. He gasped, “Alfie.” Castiel understood.

“Gabriel thinks Alfie could be in danger,” Castiel said.

“He’s alive, too? Is there an angel who _hasn’t_ been spontaneously revived?”

“Not many.” Castiel paused to breathe. “Raphael, Ishim, and Rachel attacked me.”

“Okay,” Sam agreed, “we’ll get him. Call him to let him know we’re coming. Just give me an address.”

Gabriel, pressed as close as he was, heard that and fished out his own phone as Castiel rattled off the name of the establishment. Gabriel dialed Peace-a-Pizza directly. No time to waste hoping that Alfie would pick up his cell.

“I need to talk to the manager,” Gabriel said, _actually_ praying he didn’t sound high. _Dear Dad, please don’t let me sound high_. When he was patched through, he breathlessly explained, “This is Gabriel Angelino, Alfie’s guardian. This is an emergency. Two friends of ours are coming over to pick him up. Tall, handsome, drive an old black Chevy Impala, and I bet dollars to donuts they’re wearing flannel.”

The manager must have heard the urgency in his voice, or else remembered the Naomi incident, because she complied without question and put Alfie on the line.

“Raphael ambushed our place,” Gabriel said. “The Winchesters are on their way, and then they’re going to pick up our sorry selves from wherever we landed. I don’t trust him not to grab you if he thinks you know where Castiel is. Or me, for that matter.”

“Gabriel,” Alfie whispered, “there’s something you need to know. Bartholomew is here. I think he’s watching me.”

Gabriel swore loudly and vividly. “Time to put your ninja skills to the test, bro. The second you see that damned Impala, you make a run for it.”

Alfie agreed and hung up. Gabriel wished that he could have kept his kid brother on the phone until the very moment Alfie was safe. If wishes were fishes and all that, though speaking of fishes, they had others to fry. Gabriel stared at the white sky above.

“Dad,” he said aloud, “if you love us at all, don’t let it snow. We won’t be the fun kind of snow angels.”

Castiel blinked at his brother sluggishly. The phone had long since slipped from his fingertips as he struggled to keep a hold on consciousness, as if it were a bull intending to buck him off. In his haze, he wondered if this was Gabriel’s gift—to keep laughing long after everything had stopped being funny. Castiel turned toward the sky. “I have to agree,” he slurred. “No snow angels.”

Gabriel tried to pull his brother closer with an arm that shook too much. Yep. Something was definitely broken. “C’mon,” he urged, “snuggle up. It’s gonna be a long, cold wait.”

The gesture lacked something without the soft brush of feathers, but nonetheless, it was what some might have called pleasant. Castiel was bombarded with a fond memory of a time when Gabriel had taken him flying at breakneck speeds across the Milky Way. That memory had always seemed like such an odd fit amongst his others, to the point where he would have questioned dreaming it had he ever dreamed. While Gabriel seemed to remember him with fondness, Castiel had primarily remembered Gabriel as absent.

“Hey,” breathed Gabriel, his breath a thin cloud in the air, “you have to stay awake. Keep talking.”

“About what?”

“Whatever you want.”

“I’m too tired to want.”

“That’s what she said,” Gabriel snickered.

Castiel attempted to tilt his head in confusion, despite the raging migraine it unleashed. “What who said?” he asked.

“Never mind.” It wasn’t worth explaining. “Tell me more stories. You’re the second most rebellious angel in history. You have to have some good ones.”

“They’re not good stories,” Castiel lamented. The concussion inspired his vocal chords to sound more gravelly than usual. “They’re sad. And painful. Sometimes I rebelled, but others I only…messed up. Over and over again.”

“You were always a trier, though.”

“Some of the worst things I did started with the words ‘I was trying to help.’” And wasn’t that the truth? Castiel suspected that phrase had been etched into his very make; into every molecule.

Gabriel’s arm tightened around him, perhaps in comfort, perhaps as part of a wince—involuntary either way. “It’s more than what a lot of us did.”

“It wasn’t enough,” Castiel exhaled. He wasn’t sure if it was the cold or the regret that made his eyes sting and his cheeks sore. “Balthazar was right. I turned into a monster, even if it was to protect Heaven and Earth.”

“Yeah, yeah, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” Gabriel raised his eyebrows with a half-hearted smirk. “We’re all somebody’s monster. Do you know how many times the Plaid Brigade tried to shank me? Plenty.”

“I never imagined I’d be _Heaven’s_ monster. Then again, I suppose neither did Lucifer.”

Gabriel’s jaw locked at the mention of his older brother, who had festered like an untreated third-degree burn, now locked away in a psych ward somewhere hyped up on drugs while a white-coat tried to convince him he’d never been locked in Hell. Fortunately, Gabriel had always been good at pretending everything was okay. He twisted his locked jaw into a grin until he could pry it open. “Need some confetti for that pity party?” When Castiel didn’t reply with anything other than non-vocalized vexation, Gabriel continued, “I like this you better. You’re more Castiel than you’ve been in a very long time.”

Castiel became so quiet at that that Gabriel felt the need to shake him to assure he was awake. “Stop,” Castiel groaned. “You shouldn’t shake people with concussions.”

“You weren’t answering.”

“I was thinking.”

“About?”

A cold breeze rushed by, throwing hair into faces like a schoolboy pulling pigtails. Castiel wished it would take him with it. “I thought I was keeping it a secret all these years—the never-ending doubts, always asking myself _why_. I thought no one else knew, but you always did, didn’t you? You and Naomi.”

It had hit Castiel that Naomi had reported to the archangels—a group that would have once included Gabriel. Whatever remorse Gabriel had felt about it, though, he’d hidden behind wicked grins, and it only became apparent now in the laughter lines on his face. They looked more like scars by the minute. “What can I say?” Gabriel asked. “You were a special little snowflake.”

“So you erased every misstep.”

Gabriel tried hard to think of a response that wasn’t _Yeah, basically_. In the end, he replied, “Like I said, we’ve all done bad things in the name of good. Naomi scored her job because we were _afraid._ I mean, we saw what a jackass Lucifer had turned into and Heaven couldn’t handle a second rebellion. When Michael looked at you, he kept seeing pre-jackass Lucifer. All bright and shiny and curious. He told Raphael and I that if we didn’t let Naomi play her little brain games, it wouldn’t be long before he would have to toss you out the front door. Naomi seemed like the lesser of two evils at the time.”

“At the time?”

Conveying emotions with words was tedious and imperfect, Gabriel decided. He trudged through a slurry of syllables trying to find any that could express this gnawing feeling in his chest that burned and clawed and screamed. He could have combed through every dictionary in every language and not found anything to describe the disturbing lack of sound Castiel had made when they’d brought him back; like talking to a friend who was six feet under the ground, whose life was now summarized by a name and two dates carved into a rock. The tiny, silent fledgling Naomi had returned to him had been little more than a headstone. And headstones didn’t lament darkened stars or beg for super-speed flights across the universe or flit after everything that moved.

In the end, Gabriel excavated three words from the mud of human language and delivered them as though they were fragile. “Hindsight’s a bitch.”

“Do you think I would have been like Lucifer I Naomi hadn’t intervened?”

“In the better ways,” Gabriel conceded. “He was a good brother once, before the Mark played pinball with his brain. Naomi probably stole all your warm-and-fuzzy memories of him.” Gabriel didn’t want to think of exactly how many more memories Naomi had stolen or dulled or twisted after Gabriel was gone, or any side effects that might have entailed.

“I have the feeling,” Castiel said, so hushed that he could have been talking to himself, “there’s a lot I don’t remember.”

And Gabriel had a feeling Castiel was right. Taking a deep breath that almost felt like getting stabbed all over again, he launched into the first anecdote he could think of. Something silly. Something pointless. But he needed to keep Castiel awake, so when that one ended, he struggled onto the next, like some kind of reverse bedtime story marathon. Gabriel told tale after tale to his younger brother until a big black car rolled down the road and stopped beside them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've gotten to the portion of the story where I've accidentally developed a lot of headcanons.
> 
> Thanks for reading, and more thanks for everyone who kudo'ed, commented, and/or bookmarked.
> 
> -H


	12. The Boys Are Back in Town

Picking Alfie up from Peace-a-Pizza was half awkward affair, half covert extraction mission. Dean pulled into the back lot, as close to the door as possible, and a slim boy in a maroon hoodie darted out, jumping into the backseat at Dean’s nod. Dean tore out of the lot like the hounds of Hell were behind them—or, in this case, the dirt-bags of Heaven.

“You alright?” Sam asked.

“I’m fine,” Alfie sighed, “thank you.”

“Mind explaining some of this?” Dean asked. “I mean, great, I’m glad you guys aren’t dead, but how long has this been going on for?”

As they drove, Alfie explained waking up half a year ago on the street with a backpack, a strange identification card, and none of his angelic abilities. Then he detailed running into Gabriel and Raphael, finding Balthazar, Raphael’s decision to strike out on his own, Castiel showing up, and the fight that had ensued. He had no idea why their Father had brought any of them back, but it was proving to be a messy affair so far.

“We’re almost there,” Sam spoke up after checking his phone. “Keep an eye out for them.”

If there was a unified pulse in the car, it skipped a beat when the two limp forms on the ground came into view. “Cas!” Dean shouted, leaping out the door. To his relief, Castiel raised his head and squinted hazily at him.

“Dean?” he mumbled.

“Yeah, it’s me, buddy.”

Gabriel rolled his eyes at the two of them. “What?” he asked. “No hello for me? I only _died_ for you.”

“Gabriel,” Sam said. Since Dean was on top of helping Cas, Sam made to pull Gabriel to his feet. The former archangel winced and hissed as he was moved.

“Ow, ow, ow,” Gabriel protested. “Crap. I think I cracked a rib. Oh, and Cassie has a concussion. And maybe a popped stitch.” Gabriel’s line of sight darted behind them to where Alfie was leaning out of the car. “Alfie!”

“We can have this reunion later,” Dean insisted, supporting a significant amount of Castiel’s weight with his shoulder. “Time to get this show on the road.”

They managed to squeeze all three ex-angels in the backseat, snuggly as sardines in a can. Alfie found himself sandwiched directly in the middle, left to deal with two injured brothers, both of whom had gone worryingly silent. Until they hit a pothole. Simultaneous noises of upset erupted.

“We need to get them off the road,” Sam whispered, either in respect to Castiel’s raging migraine or because he was under the impression they’d be less patronized if he went about worrying in a quiet manner.

“Twenty minutes,” Dean offered. “Twenty minutes out of town and we’ll get a motel.” Because every mile out increased the square mileage pursuers would have to search exponentially. It was some of the most useful math Dean had ever learned, next to counting rounds. He mentally catalogued their current medical supplies. They had acetaminophen for Cas’ concussion and ibuprofen for Gabriel’s ribs, but even the Winchester school of hard knocks had to consider they’d need to head to the hospital if either one of them got worse. Bleeding brains and punctured lungs would be no joke. Field medicine had its limits.

From the back seat, Alfie encouraged Gabriel to wake up, vocally, as any shaking would have been ill-received by someone with at least one fractured rib.

“Why?” Gabriel whined. “ _I_ don’t have a concussion. _I_ don’t have to stay awake. Go bother Cas. Play I Spy.”

“Do not play I Spy,” Dean warned from behind the wheel.

“Yellow car?” Gabriel suggested half-coherently. “Wait, never mind, that stopped being funny after I couldn’t zap cars yellow anymore.” He yawned and winced. Sam empathized. Sitting upright wasn’t the ideal position for a cracked rib, but laying down wasn’t much of an option without sprawling across Alfie and Cas.

“Hey,” Sam asked, more to end discussions of road trip games than anything, “how did you end up ten miles out of town without your powers, anyways?”

“Beats me,” Gabriel muttered. “Raph was bashing Cassie’s skull in, I ran in, and then _bam._ Highway.”

“I was unconscious,” Castiel supplied, which Sam took to mean he could neither confirm nor deny Gabriel’s statement.

“Well,” Sam said, “I guess if Chuck brought you back to life, he probably didn’t want you getting yourselves killed within the first year.”

“…Is he really going by Chuck?”

“Yeah, it’s…a little weird.”

“Damn straight.”

Gabriel promptly passed out for the rest of the ride. Alfie didn’t wake him up this time. Castiel tried not to be jealous of the fact that Gabriel was allowed to sleep and he wasn’t. Concussions, as Dean would say, were a bitch.

###

Ishim kicked furtively at the brick wall. A handful of years ago, that action alone would have crumbled it. “You said they were both out of power. That looked a lot like flying to me.”

Raphael remained unfazed. Impassibility was a good quality to have in a leader. To be otherwise would suggest a lack of control. Blandly, he noted, “That would be an interesting development. If it’s true, our powers are not out of our reach. Gabriel was the first to be brought back. It may be only a matter of time before we’re restored as well.”

“I’m not convinced Castiel was properly removed from the situation,” said Rachel. “We were supposed to keep him out of the way for the foreseeable future and now he’s in the wind.”

“He may not be in the trunk of a car,” Raphael said, “but he’s far from out of reach.” Raphael held out a palm, in which rested several dark strands. “You’ll be surprised how many surveillance spells can be cast with hair.”

Ishim nodded in appreciation of the idea. “You can track him down. We can still put him away.”

“That’s one option.” Raphael tucked the strands away. “However, when a situation changes, so should the plan. Gabriel chose to shield Castiel, and Alfie was whisked away by an old black Impala. Let’s see where the chips fall.”

“I know that patience is a virtue,” implored Rachel, “but giving Castiel time is a dangerous move. The last rebellion formed overnight. He’s a brilliant strategist and he plays dirty. What if he convinces Gabriel that we’re the enemy?”

“While I appreciate your counsel,” Raphael countered, “make no mistake. You were Castiel’s lieutenant. You are not mine.” He stared her down until she acquiesced with a firm nod. A soldier’s nod. And while they were soldiers, they had other roles as well. He settled a hand upon her shoulder, and did not flinch at the raw surprise in her face. Gabriel and Michael had always been better at this part. Solemnly, Raphael said, “You are not wrong, Rachel, but do not forget our goal. We want to establish peace among our siblings. I asked you here because Castiel is one of the few who could well and truly threaten that, which you know. We’re removing bad blood from our family. If Castiel happens to pool it all in one location…I would call that convenient.”

While Raphael believed that unity could only be won through conquering division, and that division required sides to be formed, Raphael preferred to lose as few of his siblings as possible. That didn’t mean he was unwilling to make sacrifices. Gabriel was naïve if he thought there would ever be another way.

###

Castiel passed out the second a bed was presented, with Dean promising to wake him up every two hours. Sam figured that Gabriel would follow suit, given how wholly unconscious he’d been in the car, and was surprised when instead Gabriel wobbled into the designated “awake people” room, contrary to Alfie’s best efforts to convince him otherwise. Sam handed him a couple of ibuprofen.

“Aw, you do care,” Gabriel teased, despite the pallor of his face. He swallowed the pills without complaint. “Thanks, Nurse Sam.”

“Cut the crap, Gabriel,” Dean said. “What’s going on?”

Sam had to agree. “First, you’re _not dead,_ which apparently is a thing now _._ Second, you look like you’re about to fall over, so there’s a reason why you’re in here instead of out cold with Cas.”

Gabriel dropped the smile. “Okay, look, there’s a bunch of undead angels out there with torches and pitchforks aimed at our boy Castiel. If Raphael had been looking to prove his was bigger, he would have done it mano a mano. That ambush? That was strategy. He’s getting people on his side by pointing out a common enemy. Namely, Mr. Concussion in the next room.”

“He’s building an army?” Sam surmised. “For what? He’s not exactly a heavenly warrior anymore.”

“Try telling him that,” Gabriel said. “I told him to suck it up and settle down, but he’s stuck on this idea that Dad’s pressed the reset button on Heaven and this whole being human thing is just a refractory period until we get our mojo back.” Gabriel didn’t mention that Raphael had probably been right.

“He wants to be top dog?” Dean guessed. “Which I’m guessing means that all the other big dogs need to be either on leashes or put down.”

Gabriel shook his head, because that wasn’t _quite_ right, but it took him a minute to phrase his sentiments. “Raph needs things to fix. Always has. But his definition of fixing things is like trying to cauterize a paper cut. And, boy, aren’t there some stories behind _that_.”

“Like the apocalypse,” Dean recalled. “And don’t think for I second I forgot you were on that train, too. Full speed ahead, even.”

Sam’s mouth twisted into a confused grimace, as his memory of the day returned, sour, like mental acid reflux. “Actually, yeah,” he said, making several vague hand gestures. “Why are you even involved in this? It’s not your usual play.”

Faced with the horror of admitting to genuine emotion, Gabriel opted for the easy way out, which was impertinence. “For the lols,” he responded. “ _Anyway,_ you’re gonna want to keep a close eye on Castiel. Raphael may be human, but he’s still one smart bastard.”

“How did he even find Cas?”

“Balthazar overheard the hospital call me about him.”

“Balthazar sold you out?”

“Bingo,” Gabriel said with a snap of his fingers that did, unfortunately, nothing. Whatever scraps of Grace he’d had were shredded by that impromptu rescue flight. He noticed Sam’s small wince at the snap nonetheless. “Well, technically he sold Castiel out. The rest of us were just collateral. People do dumb things when they’re afraid.”

“He was afraid of Raphael?”

“Of _Castiel_.” Cas, who smote demons and angels, killed Leviathans, and turned improvisational celestial governments on their heads. “Don’t forget that your pal is one scary SOB when it comes down to it. He stabbed Balthazar with an angel blade for working with you against him.”

“Guess I can’t blame him, then,” Sam sighed. “That wasn’t Cas’ best year.”

“Are any of them?”

“Not really.” Sam strummed his fingers against the wheel. “It’s been rough out there. One big bad after the other.”

“I’ve heard snippets.” Gabriel stared straight ahead, remembering a simpler time, when he wouldn’t have been able to sit next to Sam Winchester without the man aiming a blood-soaked stake at his heart. Back when they played trickster and hunter. An elaborate game of tag.

“Okay, then,” Sam breathed. “Now that that’s out of the way, what are we going to do?”

“I, for one, am gonna get the hell out of dodge,” Gabriel said, as if it should be the most obvious thing in the world.

“Hold on,” Dean growled, “Raphael is after Cas and you’re not going to do anything about it?”

“What am I supposed to do? Bake banana bread at him? Splash everyone with hot coffee? I’m no archangel anymore.”

“Raphael’s still your brother.”

“So is Lucifer. Look where that got me.” The line of scarring on Gabriel’s stomach twinged, like a gruesome keepsake. “Look, I tried, but the bad blood runs deep here, and Heaven’s choirs never really practiced singing _Why Can’t We Be Friends_.”

“I hate to say it,” Sam admitted, “but Gabriel’s right. Leaving might be for the best. This isn’t even a supernatural issue anymore. They’re just another screwed up family.”

Alfie stared forlornly at the ground. “It’s always going to be like this, isn’t it? If you’re not in the fight, you’re on the run.”

“Always has been,” Gabriel said. Guilt made the gears in his head spin wildly. He wasn’t a solo act anymore. For at least the next month, any decision he made dragged Alfie through the mud with him, such was the burden of being a legal guardian.

The sear of old wishes reared to life in his throat and behind his eyes. It was a burn he was well used to. He could remember so well—begging his brothers to throw in the towel as more and more blood spilled onto the floor beneath their fight. His voice had never counted for much. Raphael would never listen to his _little_ brother, and it wasn’t as though Gabriel could convince Michael and Lucifer to his side. Hell, from what Raphael said, even that might not do the trick, and Gabriel wasn’t going to risk telling the Winchesters that the celestial terrible two were back. Nope. He was _not_ throwing that tidbit into the High Court of Bad Decisions. They’d want him to _do something about it._

The last confession he wanted to make was that Lucifer scared him.

Not an overwhelming fear, not like one of Alfie’s panic attacks, but a deep-seated, nibbling thing that put his every nerve on high alert. It didn’t matter that Lucifer was powerless now, or that Gabriel had rebuilt a smidgen of Grace. Lucifer hadn’t used a single power to kill him last time, while Gabriel had employed his best tricks. Having someone know him like that was enough to spread a few seeds of terror. Dad-forbid Lucifer ever actually manage to cobble together some of his own power. Gabriel was already planning how to fake his own death again at the very possibility.

“Alright, fine,” Dean grumbled after a span of silence. The words must have caused physical pain. “You can stay at the bunker while you figure out an exit strategy. But I swear, Gabriel, if I end up covered in glitter and glue, you’re out.”

“But I have a baby bird.” Gabriel pointed to Alfie, then immediately winced when it pulled at his ribs.

Alfie, in turn, protested, “Don’t drag me into this. Also, for the last time, I am not a _baby._ ”

The face Alfie pulled to accompany his proclamation reminded Dean starkly of a warm day in September decades ago, and the way preteen-Sam’s nose had scrunched in distaste when Dean had dared to muss his hair in front of the other kids while picking him up from school. “Stop _,_ ” he’d said. _“_ I’m not a little kid.” Except there wasn’t a week that went by when Dean didn’t see Sam and think of the baby he’d carried out of the flames that had engulfed their home.

Dean, nonetheless, scoffed at Gabriel’s antics. “We’ll keep Alfie,” the hunter said, “Alfie’s nice. Alfie didn’t kill me three-hundred times.”

“Like you remember any of it.”

Sam was less forgiving, as evidenced by his firm implementation of the Sam Winchester Bitch Face. “Uh, I do. But if we could all just behave like adults here, I’m sure we can figure this out.”

“Right,” Dean said, raising an eyebrow at Gabriel, “Like adults.”

Sam barely refrained from telling Dean, _You’re one to talk._ Judging by Alfie’s equally hopeless expression, they were in for a rough few days.

###

Using a few of the collected the hairs, the plethora of information stored in his digital journal, and retained angelic knowledge, Raphael mangled together a tracking spell. He dripped the noxious liquid onto a map and watched as it stuttered to a halt not far out of town. Emergency stop, then. Confident that his problem was being monitored, he went about other minor chores. There was research to conduct, supplies to gather, phone calls to return, and he tried not to concentrate on how nauseatingly human it all was. _A means to an end,_ he reassured himself. None of it would matter once he could return them to Heaven and glory. Their father’s addendum had mentioned second chances, and Raphael would seize this one.

He was adamant that Castiel would not be part of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes I feel guilty about writing novel-length fanficiton, but then I pretend that it's practice. In other news, a really painful writing exercise is to give one of your characters a long, wonderful speech that describes all of their feelings and reasons to another character, then replace it with something snarky like, "Hindsight's a bitch."
> 
> Thanks everyone and have a great weekend.


	13. The Two-Time Two-Timer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Take note: I just posted a chapter yesterday as well, so make sure to read that one first.

Tabula Rasa held an extra dimness about it, draped in a coat of gray morning light that should have faded into yellow by now. Instead of empty, it felt _dead_. Like road-kill Balthazar had squashed personally. He slouched into the café, ready to face an irate Gabriel. Instead, Raelyn’s sharp figure, clad in an apron and dusted in white, caught him off guard.

“Raelyn?” he asked. “Where’s Gabriel?”

For once, Raelyn’s make-up was sloppy around the corners, and her mouth hung down with deep-seated tiredness. She leaned back against the table. “Balthazar,” she started, slow and careful, “Gabriel got into an accident. He called me last night. Broken rib.” She gave him a second to absorb the information. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear. I know you’re pretty good friends.”

“I’m sure it just slipped his mind,” Balthazar replied. His casual demeanor belied the panic playing whack-a-mole with his nerve endings. He’d only meant to chase off Castiel, with a solid beating if necessary, to keep his poisonous influence away from Gabriel, Alfie, and himself. It had been a choice between two evils, and Raphael had seemed the lesser. Gabriel out of work with a broken rib did not support that notion. Balthazar’s exterior calm flickered. “I’ll call him at lunch. Check in.”

The thoughts buzzed around him like a hive of bees while he threw on his apron. Unlike most mornings, his nametag insisted that his name was _Balthazar_. Not _Carmen Sandiego_ or _Baltha-Bizarre_ or any of the other ridiculous names Gabriel liked to replace his with. Prepping the machines was so routine that he didn’t have to divert much of his attention to them, leaving him to dwell on the sick anticipation in his stomach until the door opened with a _whoosh_ exactly at seven.

Raphael sauntered in.

His suit was absent, replaced with the flannel uniform of a hunter, and a jacket draped loosely over his shoulders. Balthazar practically dove over the counter top. “What happened?” he demanded. “You were only after Castiel. Why is Gabriel down for the count?”

Raphael raised a solitary eyebrow at the onslaught. His days of garnering unwavering respect were long gone. “Gabriel,” he enunciated, “is fine. At the very least, he was the last time I saw him.”

“Then where is he?”

“In the wind.” Raphael’s gaze darted to the back room before he lowered his voice. “Possibly in the literal sense. It looked very much like he _flew_ off with Castiel. I don’t suppose you would know anything about that?”

“No,” Balthazar lied, “I wouldn’t.” It was one thing to set Raphael on Castiel, but Balthazar wasn’t going to give Raphael incentive to remove Gabriel from the picture as well. “Sounds like you might have an interloper.”

“All of the angels fell. They can’t fly.”

“A demon?” Balthazar churned through possible excuses. “It wouldn’t be the first time Castiel has conspired with one.”

If Balthazar knew anything, Raphael realized, he was steadfast in denying it. With that in mind, Raphael backed off. “I’ll look into it,” he said. “In the meantime, I’d recommend staying alert. You know how to reach me. Don’t worry, we will find Castiel. And Gabriel.”

The twisting in Balthazar’s gut was not soothed. If anything, it grew more brutal. He couldn’t always tell the difference between a sincere Raphael and a Raphael out for blood. He’d had the best poker face in Heaven. Bollocks. What if Balthazar was a traitor twice over? A two-time two-timer?

“Yes, well,” said Balthazar, without much else to say, “let’s hope so.”

They must have raised their voices enough to be heard in the back, over the buzz of the machines, because Raelyn chose that moment to poke her head around the corner. She’d fixed her make-up at some point, the smudges gone, and if Balthazar hadn’t seen her earlier, he wouldn’t have guessed she was overwrought with exhaustion. “Look who the cat dragged in,” she said. “Finally come around to visiting our fine establishment. Everything go okay? You fell off the radar.”

Raphael glanced meaningfully at his brother. “Things are still rather…hectic, I’m afraid.” As emphasized by the series of buzzing noises emanating from his jacket. He sighed as he picked up his phone. “It never stops. Excuse me. It’s my brother. I have to take this.”

 _Brother_ was not especially helpful in determining the caller’s identity. Balthazar squinted after Raphael as he strode out the glass door, phone already up to his ear.

Raelyn, sounding casual, asked, “Did you two know each other?”

“Gabriel, Raphael, and I lived very close together when we were younger,” Balthazar supplied, which was as accurate as he could be without mentioning the words _Heaven_ and _Holy Host_.

“It’s nice that you’ve all stayed together.”

“Yes. _Lovely.”_

The chill from outside burst in as Raphael slipped back through the door, expression as neutral as ever. Perhaps he really did make all his hunting money playing backroom card games. Attempting the same neutrality, Balthazar asked, “And?”

“I have a four hour drive ahead of me, it seems,” Raphael responded. He handed over five dollars. “Double espresso. Please.”

It was the third time in Balthazar’s life he had ever heard Raphael use the word _please._ He took the money with wariness as a result. “You don’t dash off that quickly for no reason.”

“My brother, Marv, _the writer,_ ” Raphael emphasized, “is in the ER. Dog attack.”

“ _Dog?_ ” Balthazar repeated.

Raelyn was more sympathetic. Probably because she didn’t know the level of dysfunctional douche-y-ness inherent to their family. “I hope he’s alright,” she said.

“He’ll be fine,” Raphael assured, before leveling Balthazar with his best stern older brother look, “but be cautious. There was a dog attack report locally. Contact me if you see anything.”

Balthazar rolled his eyes. “What? Are you animal control now?”

“If I have to be.”

Raphael downed the double espresso like a shot.

###

Figuring out seating arrangements for the ride back to the bunker was a real-life application of the logic puzzles Sam had solved for fun as a kid—the ones where Susie sat next to Lily, and Johnny was two seats away from Arnold, and Arnold was on Susie’s right, etc. etc. As it stood, Gabriel and Dean had to be on opposite corners of the car at all times, Castiel was not allowed to sit anywhere that Dean couldn’t see him easily, and Sam had to be in the front because the back seat didn’t fit his mile-long legs.

The final arrangement was pretty _Twilight Zone_ in Sam’s opinion.

For one, he was _driving._ Second, Gabriel had managed to be placed in the coveted shotgun seat, despite the fact that he had the least legroom requirement out of them all. Dean and Castiel were crammed into the back, side-by-side, where the former could covertly mother-hen to his heart’s content without veering the car off the road. Alfie kept his face pressed against the cold glass of the window, occasionally flicking Gabriel’s shoulder when he made a distasteful comment. Apparently, the painkillers they’d given the Jackass Formerly Known as Loki had worked, because he was obnoxiously perky.

Sam tried his best to conduct neutral small talk. He’d already known that Alfie worked at the pizza place they’d rescued him from. If the logo-marked polo hadn’t given it away, the wafts of garlic and tomato sauce persistently emanating from his hair and clothing would have. To pass the time, Alfie supplied them with a few customer horror stories, as well as details on the time he had to write “Will You Marry Me?” on a pizza in black olives. Apparently, running into Gabriel had only been his third-weirdest day at work.

Gabriel, though he worked in a bakery, did not make any sort of pies, which was another point against him in Dean’s book. There were a lot of points in that book. It was starting to read more like an encyclopedia. In the back of his mind, in a cobwebbed corner Sam didn’t like to stare at for too long, he suspected it was because Dean couldn’t stand the kind of person who would abandon his family.

To Dean, the war in Heaven might as well have been a house fire, and instead of carrying his younger brothers out, Gabriel had run. Meanwhile, Sam saw a thousand fights with his own father—saw every single time he’d run away from home, including the last one, when he’d prayed for college to be a refuge. Sam remembered the sharp _zing_ of unwanted energy at three o’clock in the morning, watching the shadows, terrified that his family was dead and yet determined to lead a picket-fence life where those shadows didn’t watch him back.

Sometimes, Sam wanted to forgive Gabriel. Other times, he recalled that Gabriel was, in fact, a massive dick, family issues aside. When Asia’s _Heat of the Moment_ came roaring over the radio, Sam couldn’t remember the last time he’d glared at someone so fast. Gabriel threw his hands up in mock surrender. “No powers,” he reminded Sam. “Maybe Dad’s trying to be funny. I did get my sense of humor from somewhere.”

It was a tense, cramped car-ride.

In the end, they made it to the bunker in nine hours.

The warding was so strong that it raised the hair on Gabriel’s arms, despite his current Grace deficit. Ah. Men of Letters. He’d had fun leading them on wild goose chases, once upon a time. Henry Winchester had been entertaining to wind up. But Sam and Dean didn’t know he’d been messing with their family farther back than them, and they didn’t need to.

To say the bunker was in disarray would have been an understatement. The far side was no more than half-rebuilt; a silver knife had been embedded in a wall; books lay scattered, open-faced, on any available table; the first aid kit wasn’t closed properly; the recycling bin reeked of strong alcohol; and scraps of flannel hung off the back of a chair, marked with what looked remarkably like bloodstains.

Gabriel whistled. “Who let off a grenade in here?”

“Grenade launcher, actually,” Sam corrected. “It was the only way to get out.”

“You’re joking.”

“ _You’d_ joke about that. I wouldn’t.”

“It’s been a hell of a year,” Dean sighed, eyes lingering on Castiel. _Without you_ went unsaid. He cleared a few surfaces as he went, trying not to fidget all the while. Things he’d overlooked before suddenly screamed at him, like the knife in the wall and the sheer quantity of emptied bottles of hard alcohol. Bad habits he’d picked up again. Habits Castiel would definitely point out with squinty-eyed concern.

Dean moved the group down the hall as fast as possible. Most of the rooms remained uninhabited, with exceptions made for the living and recently dead, and he listed the ones Alfie and Gabriel could pick from. The faux joviality faded from Gabriel’s face, leaving soft sincerity in its wake.

“Thanks. I mean it,” he said, quietly, as though it pained him to—which it actually did, as a result from yesterday’s crash landing, but that was beside the point.

“Yeah, well,” Dean said, “you did help us in the end. Jig’s up, though. Now we know you’re not an asshole 100% of the time.”

“Just 90%,” Gabriel conceded with a smirk. “But shh. It’s a secret. I have a reputation to uphold.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Go lie down before you hurt yourself.”

“So authoritative,” Gabriel teased before promptly disappearing down the hall.

“95% asshole,” Dean corrected with a shrug. He turned to find Castiel stuck to his side. “You don’t need permission, man,” he said. “You’re room’s just the way you left it.”

Castiel imagined that to be an exaggeration. He was wrong. The room remained untouched, like a museum. His old trench coat hung on his desk chair, bloodied and torn through the back in the same place the stitches in his skin itched.

He didn’t ask why it hadn’t been burned with his body. He knew why. His mind supplied the crushing image of Dean standing in the center of this room, staring at it, sending the occasional prayer for Castiel or Chuck or whoever was listening to pull off one more miracle—to let Castiel come home.

It just so happened that this miracle came with a few tagalongs.

###

For all that Raphael’s name was synonymous with healing, he was growing bored of hospitals. Voices murmured their way out of the recovery room. The nurse paused before the door to explain, “A reporter came by to interview him. I think he’s still here.” She knocked on the door, then called in, “The family’s here.”

            “Don’t let me stop you,” chirped back the man who must have been the reporter. “Just wrapping up, anyways.”

Raphael hadn’t planned on letting anyone stop him in the first place, but he supposed permission made some situations easier. He stepped past the threshold and was greeted with one more familiar face than he had been expecting. The reporter was a bony man with impish features and a friendly smile. Raphael had committed these features to memory months ago, when the man had been a two-week fixture at Tabula Rasa, asking the questions that hunters typically asked. Garth, his name was. He was on one of Raphael’s charts somewhere, as Raphael suspected he had some connection to the Winchesters.

“Howdy,” said Garth in a Southern drawl as thick as molasses. “I was just here asking about the dog attack. There’s been a handful in the area.” He picked a card out of his pocket and handed it to Metatron. “Call me if you remember anything else. Thanks.”

Definitely a hunter. Sixty seconds of silence passed while Raphael and Metatron waited for Garth to ease out of earshot. In the meantime, Raphael categorized his brother’s injuries. One arm wrapped, the other hindered by a sling, and a large

bandage had been plastered to the side of his face. He thumbed idly through a trashy magazine with his good hand until Garth’s footsteps disappeared. Then, with unusually imprecise words, he said, “You missed all the fun.”

            “I had urgent business elsewhere,” Raphael responded. His hand twitched with the instinct to reach out and _mend._ His touch would do nothing, though—not anymore. “Was it the same dog?”

“If it wasn’t, we have bigger problems,” Metatron said. “I got a good look at it. It’s not a skinwalker or a witch’s familiar. It’s a Black Dog, Raphael.”

If Raphael was in the habit of cursing, he would have. “That complicates things.”

“No kidding.” Metatron shifted. He gestured vaguely to the hallway. “The reporter. I think he’s a hunter.”

“He is,” Raphael confirmed. “I saw him some months ago. He was looking for dogs then, too. I think he’s an associate of the Winchesters. This does not bode well.” He plucked the Garth’s business card from where Metatron had set it down. “I need to hold onto this.”

“What? Do you think I’m going to try calling those dunderheads?” Metatron accused. His hand stiffened around the edges of his magazine. “The Winchesters bring pain and death wherever they go. I’m not getting anywhere near them.”

In contrast, Raphael remained so stony that Metatron almost felt embarrassed about his reaction. This was not new. Raphael had that effect on people and was well-aware of it. “I need this,” Raphael said evenly, “in case I must run interference. Trust me when I say we do not want the Winchesters directly involved in this case.”

“Why not?”

Raphael missed the days when he did not have to explain himself; when his word was law. “Because I have been tracking down angels and dogs for months,” he said, “and when held side by side, those maps look too similar to be simple coincidence.”


	14. War: What Is It Good For?

Balthazar couldn’t get a hold of Gabriel. It had been two days, and he’d fathomed Gabriel might be the tiniest bit upset with him, but Balthazar was starting to wonder if his older brother might be dead in a ditch somewhere. The day wasn’t progressing fast enough to distract him, even as shorthanded as they were. Raelyn had left to get change from the bank when Rachel made an appearance.

Notably, he hadn’t seen Rachel since before he’d faked his death and run off with Heaven’s cache of weapons. He’d heard that she’d been Castiel’s lieutenant until she’d met an untimely end, conveniently without witnesses. Her vessel’s— _body’s_ —frame was lean, the kind of shape a person got into if they expected a fight. Her blonde hair was tied back tight enough to suggest the same.

“Balthazar,” she greeted with a weak smile. “It’s good to see you.”

“You look tired,” he observed. “Which I assume is why you’re _here._ ”

“Yes, well, what’s the most caffeinated item on the menu?”

“Coming right up, darling.”

He went about the buzzing and whirring machines, keeping a close eye on her as he did. “What brings you into town?” he called over his shoulder.

“Castiel,” she replied. Honest. Blunt. She must not have been human for very long. “He killed me, his own lieutenant, and I’ve heard did worse afterward. I couldn’t let him ruin our second chance. Raphael said you told us where to find him.”

Balthazar slid her cup across the counter. “I was his ally after you, and he killed me, too. An angel blade straight through the back. I have to say I agree with your sentiments. But let me be clear: I don’t want part in another war.”

“Neither do I,” Rachel supplied. She gave a hollow laugh, and it was a distinctly human sound. “It’s all we were built for, though, wasn’t it? And the fighting isn’t going to stop. Raphael says he wants only to out the bad blood, but from where I’m standing, we all seem to hate each other now. I want Castiel gone, yes, but where does it end?”

To hell with it, Balthazar poured himself a cup of what Rachel was having and sat on the barstool next to her. “It ends when there are two sides, and one of them is dead,” he replied.

“But there aren’t two sides anymore. There has to be dozens!”

“And therein lies the problem.”

Balthazar took a sip of his drink. His stomach churned. If this didn’t resolve itself soon, he was going to have to invest in a psychiatrist and prescription anxiety medication.

###

There was a silver sedan following Raphael. Well, not strictly following him, but following what he was following. It was only a matter of time before Garth settled into the chair beside Raphael at the David City library, while Metatron watched warily from the front desk.

“You’re a hunter,” Garth concluded, pointing at Raphael’s collection of books. They were, admittedly, 70% mythology, 20% botanics, and 10% medical texts, which comprised the standard hunter’s reading list. “And I don’t mean deer.”

“You’re right,” Raphael said, voice smooth, without looking up from his book. He waited the approximate amount of time it would take a person to feel excited about being correct to continue, “Bears, mostly.”

Garth was undeterred. “It’s a Black Dog.”

“Does the color matter?” Raphael flipped the page innocuously. Former archangel or not, he’d been a younger brother, and younger brothers were innately gifted with the ability to irritate. “Really, I’m only thankful that Marv doesn’t have rabies.”

“Okay,” Garth sighed. “Lone wolf, that’s cool.” He spared an odd smile at the remark, and Raphael took a moment to glimpse the silver bullet around his neck. There was a story there, then. “But if you need backup,” Garth continued on, pulling out a slip of paper, “This is how you can find me.”

“Noted.”

Raphael continued turning pages, barely reading them, until Garth left the library. Metatron meandered over and covertly began stacking books with his good hand. “Is he going to keep following us?”

“Until that dog is dead,” Raphael responded. “He thinks you’re his best lead, and, unfortunately, he’s convinced himself I’m more than a concerned family member.”

“I still can’t believe you’re a hunter.”

“I am _not_ a hunter. I am _acting_ to get what I want.”

“I’ve seen the trunk of your car and you’re wearing flannel.”

“If you’re criticizing me, I’m more than willing to leave you in _Garth’s_ hands.”

“I’m not sure that stick bug could save someone from a terrier.”

“Then I suggest you stop criticizing.”

An embargo on conversation seemed to be the only way they would make it to the end of Metatron’s shift without causing a scene, and so they spent the next hour and a half in silence. On his way out, Raphael took a slow stroll past the windows, and saw that the silver sedan was no longer in its spot. With any luck, Garth had taken the hint. Raphael checked the pistol subtly hidden inside his jacket before they passed the library threshold. Only 4:30, and already the sky was dark. The building lights offered little reprieve from the firm, obsidian grasp of night.

Metatron rushed his steps toward the car, chased by the low growl that lived on inside his memory. Raphael followed at a steadier pace that allowed him to keep his head on a swivel without getting motion sick. Being born a soldier had made him calm in the face of danger. The same could not be said for Metatron, who had always been a scribe first and foremost, and then a runaway, like Gabriel.

And mortality did have a way of placing imaginary predators in one’s peripherals; always out of sight, but never out of mind.

They were less than a mile from home, at the edge of where the city began to look more like a town, and the streetlights grew farther apart, when they heard the shriek. Raphael veered the car toward the noise.

Metatron thought abut begging Raphael not to chase after the damn thing, but knew his protests would fall on deaf ears. It was better to kill it now, Raphael would argue. The wheels had barely stopped rolling before Raphael was outside, gun in hand.

The lawn had been freshly decorated with the mutilated form of a woman, the day’s mail scattered around her, dyed red. Raphael held the gun level and did a 360. The dog was _here._ He strained his ears as much as he could, but knew that the average human hearing range was 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz, narrow in comparison to an angel’s, and not nearly enough in this case. So close to the road, there was no shortage of sound pollution, either.

Cars revved and whined. The sounds were very much like growls, or so the adrenaline in his veins kept whispering to him. One parked not far away and he became distinctly aware that he was standing in some woman’s front yard with a gun in his hands and her corpse on the ground. A motorcycle roared past and he was a hairsbreadth away from filling it with lead.

The keen of the engine was why he hadn’t heard it: heavy paws and heavier breathing. Claws were suddenly in his stomach.

“Graah!” he screamed as he tried to aim the pistol. The dog was managing to keep him from aiming properly, swatting his arm away like it was little more than a fly. He kneed it far enough backward to wrestle his arm up.

A bang split the air.

It was not from Raphael’s gun.

Two more bangs, and the dog fell over dead. Raphael panted shallowly, trying to restore his oxygen supply without unnecessarily moving the pin-cushion that was his abdomen. A hand stretched into his line of sight. He looked up blearily.

“You alright?” asked the man known as Garth.

Raphael almost would have rather died. Again.

###

Raphael had very reluctantly followed Garth back to his motel, and only after Garth had insisted he’d been keeping track of Black Dog sightings. Fresh stitches pulled at his stomach as he settled on one side of the coffee table.

“There’s buckets of them,” Garth said, pulling out a map that looked disturbingly like Raphael’s own. It was only a matter of time before this travelled back to the Winchesters, who were liable to follow the leads and uncover the tiny clusters of once-angels. “Look, I know you’re the ‘I work alone’ type, but whatever this is, it’s _nasty._ I’m not saying we should go Starsky and Hutch, but it couldn’t hurt to keep each other in the know, you know?”

“I suppose.” Raphael conceded, not because he agreed, but because he didn’t like the idea of this Garth snooping around the ex-angels without his knowing. Raphael had to warn them if the Winchesters were about to pop into town. It was about gathering intelligence.

“So, then,” said Garth, sticking out a hand. “I’m Garth. What’s your name, hombre?”

Raphael had a prime alias that he used with hunters. He couldn’t exactly go around announcing himself as Raphael to potential friends of the Winchesters, even if it was still an acceptable human name. Only Beck, Raphael’s first hunter acquaintance, knew his name, and that was because Raphael hadn’t been able to obtain a reliable fake ID yet.

As such, Raphael had been very clear that Beck was not to call him Raphael in public because, Raphael reasoned, basically being named Archangel McAngel was not funny in this line of work, especially with people so paranoid about celestial beings these days. Beck had agreed, and Raphael had had to rifle quickly through his mind for a convincing alternative name. The result had been a derivative of the name belonging to his favorite of a book character. He’d been using it ever since.

He shook Garth’s hand. “Grange.”

The other man smiled wide. “Garth and Grange. Has a nice ring to it. Down to business, then.”

###

There were birds of prey that made noises less unnerving than the one coming from Alfie’s nightstand. His phone insistently blared the lyrics to _My Heart Will Go On—_ a prank setting Gabriel had thrown in last month that Alfie hadn’t bothered undoing. The screen read _Balthazar._ It took him nearly until the end of the ring to decide to pick up.

“Hello,” he sighed, quietly, as if afraid of being overheard speaking to The Traitor.

“ _Finally_ ,” Balthazar replied. “I was two days away from presuming you both dead.”

“We’re not,” Alfie said, unsure of how else to elaborate. He didn’t want to detail the extent of the injuries on their side for fear that Raphael might incorporate it into whatever strategy he was assembling. He racked his brain for a mature way to express his aggravation, but only came up with “I can’t believe you _told on us._ ”

“Hear me out,” Balthazar said. “Anyone who gets close to Castiel _dies._ I wasn’t about to let that be you or Gabriel.”

Alfie’s inner Gabriel piped up. _What outcome were you_ hoping for _? That we’d be okay with Raphael decorating the outside of the building with chunks of our brother’s skull?_ He reigned it in. He was not going to lose his temper. “Castiel was _leaving_.”

“The man’s a boomerang. He would have been back. With friends, too, I imagine. I’m assuming you’re all with the Winchesters?”

“I’m not going to tell you that and you know why.”

“Mm, say hello to the boys for me.” On the other end of the line, Balthazar paced his apartment, less like a large jungle cat and more like a skittish domestic shorthair. “Just…tell Gabriel to talk to Raphael. Hardly anyone wants another war, so if we’re very lucky, we can dodge this bullet. It has to be over before Michael and Lucifer get involved.”

“What are you talking about?” Alfie asked. “Michael and Lucifer are locked away.”

“In a _psych ward,_ ” Balthazar corrected. “On temporary hold. They’ll be let out eventually.”

Personally, Alfie had never had a rug pulled from beneath his feet, but he was familiar with the expression, and he had an inkling it felt exactly like this. His stomach dropped. Perspiration chilled his skin and made his palms slick, so that the phone became difficult to grasp. “They’re _where?_ ”

“At the River Regional Mental Health Facility near Rapid City,” Balthazar answered. “I take it Gabriel failed to mention?”

The room began to spin sickeningly. “I…have to go,” Aflie choked out. He didn’t wait for a goodbye, too desperate to get out of the room. The floor was uneven beneath his feet. His pulse was in his ears, underscoring the repeated chanting of _compromised, compromised, compromised._

The common area rushed toward him faster than he was ready for. For a second, he perceived everything about the room—the new lack of bloodstains and beer bottles, Dean standing by the open fridge, Sam behind his laptop, and Gabriel laying on the couch like nothing was wrong, mouth open mid-sentence, the corner of his mouth ticked upward despite the severity of the situation.

Alfie came close to decking him. “You’re such a dick!” he hissed at his older brother. “Gabriel, you—how could you—I had to find out from _Balthazar._ ”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Gabriel said, gesturing lightly. “Easy there. You found out what from who?”

Alfie didn’t care if Sam and Dean were in the room. They probably needed to know, anyway. “Balthazar called me because he thought Raphael or Castiel had _killed us,_ since you weren’t picking up your _damn phone,_ and then he told me that, apparently, Michael and Lucifer are _in a psych ward_ and _you knew._ ”

“Oh. That.”

“Yeah. _That._ ”

“Hold on,” Dean interceded, rounding the counter with his hands outstretched, as thought ready to pull them apart from each other. “ _Lucifer_ and _Michael_?”

“Gabriel,” Sam scolded, “that’s not something you leave out.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Gabriel’s mood was often very like a light switch, and the provocation had flicked it from cheeky to assertive. He stood in an ill-gotten attempt to seem bigger than he was, which was poor strategy considering there were eight inches of height difference between them, Gabriel’s chest was on fire, and Sam had the honed muscles of a hunter. Thank God Sam couldn’t see him puffing up any feathers. “If I told you, the first thing you’d want to do is dive back into that pool of crap. You’d want to take a fun little road trip up to there to slap a DEFCON level on this thing, and then sooner or later, someone’s going to tell me I have to talk to them, and we’ll be back in the crossfire. But newsflash: they don’t care about what I say. Never have, never will.”

Alfie was not taking that for an answer. “You still didn’t tell me, and they’re my brothers, too, Gabe. I deserved to know.”

“Right, it’s not like you’re practically having a heart attack or anything.” Gabriel tried to toe the line between caring and firm, but his balance was wobbly, and either side was a ten foot drop. “Seriously, kid, sit down. You’re shaking like a Chihuahua.”

“Don’t…don’t _patronize me._ ”

“Alfie. Sit down before you hurt yourself.”

“You’re doing it again. I’m not a child, Gabriel, and you’re not Michael, so stop acting like it.”

While they may have been words, Gabriel reacted like they were holy oil and an accompanying lit match. Breathless, he sputtered, “I am not.”

“Deciding you know what’s best because you’re older,” spat Alfie. “If that’s not exactly like Michael, I don’t know what is.” With that, he leveled Gabriel with a final watery glare, then bolted from the room. A slamming door could be heard seconds later. Gabriel stumbled under his own weight, back onto the couch, blinking profusely in disbelief. Alfie had held up a mirror, and Gabriel’s own face hadn’t been staring back at him.

At the kitchen counter, Dean turned to Sam, whose blank gaze indicated he hadn’t fully processed the emotional whirlwind that had just ripped the room asunder. “Well,” Dean said, “which one do you want?”

“Huh?”

“Alfie or Gabriel? Pick one.”

“We could just…leave them alone?”

“You sure ‘bout that? ‘Cause from my experience, this is the part where someone does something stupid.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like honesty is exactly our forte, either.”

“But we are _experienced,_ so c’mon. Pick one.”

It was a decent point, Sam concluded. He and Dean had always managed to forgive each other, no matter than transgression. Besides, he wasn’t positive he could take a bunker-full of angst-ridden ex-angels. He alternated his attention between the couch and the hallway, the decided, “I’ll take Alfie. Little brother to little brother, you know?”

“Then I’ve got Gabriel. Big brother to big brother.” Dean breathed like he was lifting heavy weights. “This should be fun. If you hear Cas, keep him in his room.”

“We’re not going to tell him? After all that?”

“We’ll tell him as soon as I don’t have to worry about his brain bleeding. For all we know, he’ll go after Lucifer, and I ain’t no doctor, but two concussions two days apart doesn’t spell anything good. We just got him back. I’m not risking it.”

Sam wavered his head, considering, before settling on, “Fair enough. Alright. Good luck.”

“Same to you.”

The skyscraper of a man leaving the room should have made it feel emptier, and yet the walls seemed to close in, pushing Dean closer to Gabriel than he really would have preferred. Okay. This conversation was going to need beer. Dean popped the cap off a cold one for himself, then brought a second over for Gabriel, though he doubted the bitterness of the hops would agree with Gabriel’s infamous sweet tooth. Unsurprisingly, Gabriel made no move to touch the bottle after it had been set on the table.

“I stand by what I said,” Gabriel stated. He stared hard ahead of him, as if interrogating the air. “I’m not getting involved with whatever beef you have with Lucifer, celestially neutered or not.”

“Not what I’m here to talk about,” Dean replied, “but that’s definitely on the table for later.”

Gabriel shrugged with feigned nonchalance, offering his smarmiest leer. That usually did the trick. He could already see Dean beginning to grimace, disgust both evident and expected. Gabriel pushed his leer a little further, to a level that would make any straight man uncomfortable. “Just saying,” he taunted, “if you aren’t threatening a man, there aren’t many other reasons to back him into a couch.”

Dean tried to reel in his gut reaction with little success. “Cut that crap, Gabriel. We need to talk about the train wreck that just went down.”

Gabriel scoffed. “Dean Winchester trying to give a feelings talk—I know jokes, and that’s a bad one.”

“Oh, no, this isn’t a feelings talk _._ This is a responsibility talk. Ain’t easy being in charge. Comes with a lot of hard decisions.” Dean took a long sip of his drink while he waited for a response.

“Like you have room to talk,” Gabriel derided. “You and Sam kept more secrets than the CIA.”

“And it’s gone South every single time,” Dean replied. “I can tell you this: that kid over there _trusts you._ He wouldn’t get _that_ mad if he didn’t. You gotta realize how much that’s worth.”

“Why do you think I don’t?”

“Because it’s hard to see trust when you don’t have much of it,” Dean said. His stomach roiled with the acidity of his honesty. Preaching about _trust_ never sat well. “Trust isn’t easy when you’ve spent most of your life lying to people, or being lied to. Believe me, I know.” The way Gabriel adamantly glared at the unopened beer let Dean know he was getting through. “You can’t expect Alfie to follow you blindly.”

“I don’t,” Gabriel said, “but it was bad timing. I found out yesterday, right before Raphael and Castiel’s little _tete-a-tete_. It was too much at once—which is not something I say lightly, bee-tee-dubs.”

Dean hated it when Gabriel tried to be cool by using teen slang, and the suggestive eyebrow wiggle at the end accomplished its intended purpose of making Dean want to escape Gabriel’s proximity ASAP. He fought to straight-face through it. “Too much for Alfie or too much for you?”

“Alfie’s been one spark shy of the Hindenburg for months and I am not lighting that match.”

“Right, and I’m going to believe it had nothing to do with what happened at the Elysian Fields.” The neon sign would always be burned into the back of Dean’s mind, vibrant teal and alight with bad mojo.

The more perceptive Dean showed himself to be, the more Gabriel’s instincts fought to say things that he knew would push the older Winchester out of the room. “You’re putting words in my mouth. I like a lot of things in my mouth, but words aren’t one of them.”

“Would you _stop that?_ ”

“Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“You’re trying to get me to drop this,” Dean said. “Damn it, Gabriel, I’m trying to help you _._ I know it was bad, but—”

“ _Bad_ is your date standing you up,” Gabriel all but snarled. “That was torture _._ ” He put 100% of his attention on Dean. The switch was the difference between being out in the sun on a hot day, and being out in the sun on a hot day while under a giant magnifying glass, frying like an ant. Gabriel wielded this tactic well. “Lucifer and I weren’t much different than you and Sam once upon a time. You asked me to kill my older brother. I tried to talk him down. He stabbed me through the chest because his stupid war was worth more than me. I may be a crap big brother, but at least I’m doing it without trying to kill my family, which is better than the jackasses I grew up with.” Gabriel leaned in close for a final simmering scowl. “Conversation. Over.”

Dean, apparently, didn’t agree with him. As Gabriel stood, jerkily, and made to storm out of the room, the older Winchester stood in his way, one arm out, like a toll booth. Instead of asking for change, though, Dean asked for another minute of his attention. He said, “One more thing.”

“ _What?!”_

“What you’re feeling right now?” Dean answered, his tone controlled. “Like someone’s burning a hole through your chest?” There was a long pause as Dean silenced everything else he could describe, from the overwhelming weight of the world, to the suffocation that accompanied sudden responsibilities, to the sheer terror that you’d make every bad decision you’d hated someone else for making. “Don’t forget it. Just remember that you never want anyone you care about to feel that way, and then promise to keep it that way.” Dean stepped to the side, arm sliding back down. “ _Now_ you can go.”

Gabriel was out of there like a crippled bat out of hell.

###

For all that hunters played it cool and gruff, the community was rife with mental illness—PTSD, paranoia, anxiety, depression, etc. Sam was so used to dealing with it that he didn’t so much as flinch when he found Alfie hunched over on his bedroom floor, sweating and shaking, but trying to look for all the world like a surly teenager. Slowly, Sam sat next to him. “You okay?” Sam asked.

“Fine,” Alfie said. “I’m fine. There is nothing wrong with me.”

“I didn’t say there was.”

The room remained incongruously silent, given how the inside of Alfie’s head was a tornado, picking up thoughts and throwing them against the interior walls of his skull with the force of a freight train. _Compromised, compromised, compromised._ Alfie wasn’t to be trusted with important information. It would slip out of his mouth, unbidden, like the angelic secrets he’d given to Crowley. The remembered agony of spikes being driven into his head tempted him to vomit. His human stomach was weak. _He_ was weak. _Compromised, compromised, compromised._

He started tracing patterns on his arm, each movement determined. Sam noticed. “You want a pen?” he asked.

“No, it’s okay,” Alfie answered. He was already invading the Winchester’s home, after they’d had to rescue him like some damsel. Asking for anything else seemed like an overstep, let alone for an object as silly as _a damn pen._ Why was he so needy?

“Alfie, it’s fine,” Sam said, then stepped outside. Alfie felt his face flush until it burned. His ears were lingering somewhere in the fourth circle of Hell by the time Sam returned with a pen and notepad. Alfie accepted it with a quiet thank you. Drawing on paper lacked the grounding touch Alfie needed, though, and after the first few lines of ink, he switched to drawing on his arm. Enochian sigils didn’t come as fluently as they once had. Each stoke wavered. Yet, as imperfect as they were, Sam recognized them easily enough.

“That’s angel warding,” Sam said.

Alfie paused. “It’s a precaution.” Then, bitterly, as if he was spitting out acid rather than English, “In case they decide I’m still _compromised_.”

“You want to talk about it?” Sam offered.

The lines Alfie drew became harsher. “There’s nothing to talk about. I told Crowley everything he needed to know about angels. I couldn’t be _trusted_ to keep living.”

Sam cursed internally. Trigger detected. “I can see why it would bother you that Gabriel didn’t tell you about Michael and Lucifer.”

Alfie drew purposefully for another minute, using the tedium of the gesture to organize his thoughts into some semblance of logical sense. The black lines on his skin would have once rendered him powerless. Now they meant _safety._ Everything was upside down. At last, he admitted, “I don’t like what he did to Balthazar either.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that Balthazar made a mistake, yes, but Gabriel cut him off without a second thought. To Balthazar, he _left._ Again. I can’t help but think maybe that’s all it takes. You just have to mess up _once._ I can’t…I can’t live like that.” The bottom line stood that Alfie wasn’t sure if he could trust Gabriel. Worse still, Alfie felt racked with guilt over it, because since they’d all returned to life, Gabriel had been trying so hard to be supportive.

“Have you told Gabriel that?” Sam asked.

“No.”

“Maybe when you’re both…calmer, you should,” Sam suggested. He understood that he had to play the devil’s advocate to keep the peace, though that didn’t make it any more pleasant. “I don’t think this is easy on either of you, but you both need to know where you stand. And if you decide you can’t go with him, you can stay here. We’ve got plenty of space.”

Alfie tucked his chin against his knees. His throat ached. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” Sam replied. He stopped just shy of giving the kid a firm pat on the back, only because he realized Alfie might not appreciate it at the moment. “Get some rest.”

As soon as Sam was gone, Alfie let out a shuddering breath. “Father,” he whispered, the prayer awkward with disuse, “why did you even bother bringing us back, if you were just going to watch us kill each other again?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unfortunately, this isn't going to wrap up before the season premiere this week. Still, there's just a few chapters left, so expect a lot of moving and shaking.


	15. Who Let the Dogs Out?

When Metatron had retired the previous night, thrown into a sound slumber by an ample helping of Percocet, Raphael had been quietly reading a book from the library. As Metatron wandered back out the next morning, adjusting his reading glasses over squinted eyes, the coffee table was suffocating beneath mountains of papers, electronics, and a well-used coffee mug. Raphael’s voice drifted from the bathroom. Tinny, indecipherable responses came from his phone.

Metatron poked and prodded his way through the mayhem. The Black Dog map bore new marks. The laptop brimmed with emails and drafted responses. The book from last night held six bookmarks, each one a different vibrant sticky note from Metatron’s collection, with painfully neat handwriting at the top. A heavy rim around the top of the mug suggested it had been filled no less than three times.

Raphael must have heard him, as the archangel-turned-quasi-hunter appeared from the bathroom, phone pressed against his ear. Uncharacteristic stubble lined his jaw. The dark circles were becoming customary, hanging like shadowy hammocks from the corners of his eyes.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Raphael responded with more than a touch of frustration. Not the kind that came with a sting of bad luck—the kind one associated with small children asking incessant questions. Raphael’s roaming gaze locked on Metatron. A desperate idea bloomed beyond obsidian irises. “I see. How do you feel about Metatron?...Perfect. Why don’t you talk to him for a minute?”

Raphael stretched out the phone to Metatron, who took it hesitantly. “Hello?”

“How’s it hanging, bro?” came the lilted response.

Metatron ripped the device away from his ear and held his hand over the speaker. “ _Lucifer?_ Why did you put me on the phone with _Lucifer?_ ”

“He’s high, I’m busy, and apparently, you are ‘cool’ with him. Something about saving his life.”

“…It’s a long story.”

“Which I’m sure you will tell eloquently _later._ ” Raphael strode over to his makeshift desk and started tying furiously. “Keep him preoccupied for a minute.”

Cautiously, Metatron returned the phone to his ear. “It’s been a while,” he replied.

Lucifer laughed like it was the funniest joke he’d ever been told. “Good one. I mean, what’s a few years compared to millennia, right?”

“Right...” Metatron glanced at Raphael for help. None came. “So…what have you…been up to, lately?”

Lucifer snorted. “Oh, don’t sound so worried. I’ve been on my best behavior. Not going to get out of here any other way. Michael on the other hand—such a ne’er-do-well. He started a fight with me today. It was almost touching, really. Not a single neuron firing in his brain in ages, and I got to be his first fight. Then the orderlies had to go and ruin it.”

And, Metatron assumed, gave him something to calm him down, because Grace or no Grace, Lucifer was a mean fighter. This was probably the tail end of the drug’s effect. Maybe they’d given him phone time to keep him distracted.

“Dad’s an idiot,” Lucifer said very suddenly. “Did he seriously think we’d all get along just because he’d drained our batteries? I mean, I can’t even imagine how many people hate _you_. Hah. We could start a club.”

“I was trying to fix Heaven.”

“I was trying to fix Earth,” Lucifer replied, more soberly than before. “Rule One: Nobody _wants_ to be fixed. You have to force it on them. Bend them until they fold like origami.”

Metatron did not like this conversation. He looked to Raphael again and, to his relief, Raphael seized the phone. “I’m back,” he said, followed by, “Yes, it’s unfortunate that they had to take away your paper crane strings, but they were a fire hazard, and I don’t imagine you’d be fond of catching fire.” Raphael rolled his eyes at Metatron. “Yes, I will visit soon, but I have to go now. I’ll tell Metatron you said goodbye.”

Raphael hung up, sighing in exhaustion.

“Late night?” Metatron asked, indicating the evidence splayed across the table. “Did you even sleep?”

“For a few hours,” Raphael replied. He began stashing his work into his bag. “There were more Black Dog sightings. The hunter community is starting to grow suspicious. I had to warn our brothers in those areas to keep their heads low, or else leave.”

“What about your chat with Lucifer?”

“I like to keep an eye on him and Michael. They are, after all, my older brothers.”

Metatron bit his tongue. From anyone else, that may have sounded sentimental, but Metatron knew that with Raphael, it was also a political statement. Better to keep those figureheads of celestial war off to the side and drooling until Raphael was sure he had the resources to either bend them or break them. Also better to keep their tacit endorsement in his back pocket as a coercive technique. It wasn’t as though they could do much to deny it, trapped and isolated as they were.

The play was cold and brilliant and terrifying, the way the best tacticians often were. He even _packed_ strategically. The mess on the coffee table was gone in minutes and, with a start, Metatron realized that aside from the coffee cup, there were no signs that Raphael had stopped by.

Like a true hunter, really, and in its own way, that was equally terrifying.

“Well, then,” Metatron said, swallowing in order to wet the sudden dryness in his throat, “have a nice drive.”

As soon as Raphael was out the door, Metatron muttered to himself, “I have to move.” He was determined not to be caught between the ex-celestial Scylla and Charybdis thrashing on the horizon.

###

At some point, the Men of Letters Bunker had become the _Brady Bunch_ bunker—full of children, with precious few mature adults between them. Although, Dean had to admit, there were worse things than waking up to a full batch of cinnamon-apple muffins straight out of the oven and the invigorating scent of hot coffee wafting down the hall.

            “Morning, Martha Stewart,” Dean greeted Gabriel, one eyebrow raised. “What’s the occasion?”

            The shorter man inhabited the couch, watching Netflix on his phone, and responded without looking up. “Please. First, I’m Paula Deen. You don’t want to know how much butter is in those. Second, they’re not apology muffins, if that’s what you were hoping for, because there’s nothing I need to apologize for.”

Castiel appeared from down the hall, took one look at the pan, and yawned, “Alfie said you stress-bake. He predicted the muffins correctly.”

Dean tried to smother his smirk. “Stress-baking, huh?”

“Shut up,” Gabriel snipped. “I could have worse coping techniques.”

Castiel offered the expression of disapproval he usually reserved for Bad Winchester Choices. “You shouldn’t be baking with broken ribs.”

“I do what I want.”

Putting the argument in the background, Dean curiously snatched one of the muffins from the pan. An itching part of his brain insisted that he shouldn’t trust anything Gabriel gave him, but the rest focused on his growling stomach and reminded him that he had, in fact, eaten less trustworthy confections and survived. He took a bite.

“Oh, man,” he remarked. “These are actually _good._ ”

“I’m offended that you’re surprised. In fact, I’m so offended that I’m leaving the room.” Mostly because he needed a shower. And a shave. Dad had bestowed upon him some rather prolific facial hair and two days of not shaving had resulted in a noticeable beard.

Castiel poured himself a cup of coffee, then one for Dean, as it was both polite and proved to his friend that, yes, he _could_ handle basic tasks. He was a quarter way through the mug when Sam and Alfie made their way to the kitchen. It was important to note that Alfie was doing his level best to hide his narrow six-foot frame behind Sam’s broader six-foot-four, which mathematically should have worked, but in actuality resembled a gangly conga line. Sam either didn’t notice Alfie’s shadowing, was sympathetic to it, or was too engrossed in his phone call to care.

“I don’t know, Garth,” Sam said into the speaker, “now might not be the best time to stop by. It’s a little…” He surveyed the room. “…crowded in the bunker right now.”

“Garth?” Dean asked from the table. “What’s he saying?”

Sam replied, “Turns out those attacks we thought could be werewolves? Black Dogs. Like, a _lot_ of Black Dogs. Garth has a map and he’s been talking to other hunters.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Dean said, nearly launching himself across the table. “Give me the phone.”

Sam handed it over in favor of getting breakfast. He was, in fact, aware of Alfie’s presence right behind him, but didn’t push the issue just yet. Alfie had spent last night pretty frayed at the ends, and it showed this morning in the way he moved—as though he’d been tied to boulders. Sam discreetly slid him a cup of coffee.

On the phone, Dean’s voice took on the chiding tone that he reserved for dumbasses he liked. “Garth, you know why I don’t want you around other hunters too much….No, you’re _not_ a smooth criminal; someone is going to figure it out eventually.” Dean turned to Sam and rolled his eyes, as if his position on Garth’s behavior wasn’t clear enough. “You should have come to us before outsourcing….Okay, fine. Fine. See you soon.”

After Castiel took a moment to finish chewing his muffin, because he insisted on having decent table manners to counterbalance Dean’s frankly atrocious ones, he queried, “Isn’t Garth your werewolf friend?”

“That’s the one,” Dean confirmed. “We asked him for help investigating what looked like werewolves, but now he’s saying they’re all Black Dogs.”

Castiel considered this in the way most might consider a math problem, and his furrowed brow suggested complex calculations. “If Black Dogs are coming out in swarms,” he said, “then we need to be worried. Black Dogs are distantly related to Hellhounds. They gather where the Veil is thin, which would indicate that the Veil is thinning over wide areas. We need to find out if there are specific locations. You said that Garth has a map?”

“Yeah. The attacks were clustered,” Sam replied. “It’s why we were thinking it was a werewolf pack.” He didn’t add that because most of the attacks had been on animals, they’d hoped for relatively peaceful werewolves, like Garth. When they’d explained the pattern, their lupine friend had been all over it—he and his wife Bess hadn’t had much luck tracking down others with their eating habits, and werewolves were innately _social._ They derived comfort from the protection of bigger packs. As such, the Fitzgerald Pack of two was a little undersized for their tastes. The incident with the Men of Letters tracking them didn’t do much to improve any feelings of insecurity.

“I want to help,” Castiel decided.

“Research-only,” Dean countered. “No field work until we’re sure your brain is intact.”

Castiel didn’t argue too heavily. If he had to compare his headache to the size of a physical object, he would have picked the Himalayas. It was stubbornness that kept him upright. On his way to change clothes, he passed by the bathroom, where water continued to steam and roar. Apparently, like Chuck, Gabriel was a fan of long showers. Castiel knocked on the door. Wincing at the volume of his own voice, he called, “We’re going to have a visitor.”

“Fine. I’ll remember to put on pants.”

“Please do.” Castiel shook his head. It was all so absurdly domestic. He was about to continue on his mission of obtaining proper clothing when he noticed Alfie skittering behind him, head down. It set off Castiel’s mental alarms. “Alfie,” he said, following him. “You seem to be…distressed.”

Alfie shrugged. “Gabriel and I had a fight last night. I’m not ready to talk to him yet.”

“A fight? About what?”

“Oh. Um…” Alfie ducked his head. He scrambled for a phrase that would explain the situation without mentioning Lucifer, Michael, or Balthazar. “He seems to think that my apparent age disqualifies me from any serious discussions or decisions. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Alfie was gone before Castiel could even consider pursuing the topic.

###

12-year-old Garth would have gone ballistic over being invited to a real-life secret base. He still felt like he should be wearing a cape and a mask as he descended down the stairs behind Dean. His keen olfactory senses picked up old books, the unique aroma of a grandparent’s basement, coffee, and…fresh baked goods. The absolutely overwhelming scent of sugar and vanilla and _butter._

“Hey, Garth,” Sam greeted. A man about Garth’s height stood to his right, bearing sharp features and an expression of near-perpetual consternation. He wore a blue sweater and a raggedy trench coat, the latter of which seemed wholly unnecessary. Sam nudged the man’s shoulder, and he suddenly remembered to appear more approachable.

“I’m Castiel,” said the man. “It is…nice to meet you.” He tentatively accepted Garth’s warm handshake and was relieved when Garth didn’t go for the hug, as he was warned might happen.

“Cool beans,” said Garth. “Nice to meet you, too. Dean talks about you all the time. Now I just have one question: Why do I smell butter? Like, _a lot_ of butter?” He peered around, trying to find the source. “Ooh, muffins.”

From down the hall, they heard Gabriel call, “Told you I was Paula Deen!”

“Houseguest,” Dean explained, handing one over. Faint warmth continued to cling to them. “Stress-baker.”

“Yeah, well, tell your houseguest he’s a great stress-baker.”

And again, from down the hall: “I’m a better unstressed-baker.”

Dean groaned silently, which was a skill he’d picked up more-so from raising Sam than from any expression of ideal stoic manliness. Garth was fluent in compliments, and Gabriel absorbed them like a sponge, each one further inflating his ego. He’d be unbearable by the next morning. They were clearly both waiting for an introduction, though, even if Gabriel hadn’t actually bothered to enter the room yet. The diva wanted to be announced.

“Garth,” said Dean, “that’s Gabriel. Gabriel, this is our friend Garth.”

“That’s funny,” said Garth, unfurling the map he’d brought. “I met another Gabriel who bakes. Brookings, South Dakota. See, it’s on the map. Great bakery. Nice guy.”

Dean watched as Gabriel strode into the room, mild shock lighting his expression. “Tabula Rasa?”

“ _Gabe?”  
“Garth?”_

Dean interrupted in the usual fashion—by stepping right into the middle of the drama and doing his best impression of directing street traffic. “You two know each other?”

“He was a regular for a few weeks,” Gabriel said. “I _knew_ you were in Mystery Inc.”

“Hey, hombre, small world,” Garth suggested with all his typical enthusiasm. “You know Sam and Dean? Are you a hunter, too?”

Sam broke into peals of thoroughly caustic laughter. “Gabriel? A hunter? No.”

Poor Garth looked thoroughly confused about the prospect that a non-hunter would be here, which said more about the Winchesters than it did him.

Gabriel decided to take pity on him. “Ex-archangel, former Norse God, presently muffin-maker extraordinaire, still handsome.”

Garth expressed suspicion about being tricked.

“He’s not lying,” Castiel confirmed. “Gabriel is my older brother.”

Garth’s face lit up—the same nerdy way Sam’s used to about certain books. _“Cool._ ”

Sam decided to push this along before Garth exploded with questions about their odd residents. “You said Brookings was on the map?”

Garth pointed to it. It couldn’t be denied, they _were_ clusters, but they weren’t along any ley lines. Garth had articles regarding other events that had happened in the area. Castiel searched them thoroughly for anything that might indicate what had caused the Veil to thin.

“This is so weird,” Sam muttered. “I mean, we’ve never even seen a Black Dog before, and we’ve seen pretty much everything.”

“Except for a plaid flannel you didn’t like,” Gabriel quipped. Curiously, he peeked over their shoulders, analyzing the red zones. His invisible wings went stiff. “Oh, damn it.”

Dean’s head snapped up so fast that his neck should have broken. “Care to share with the class?”

Gabriel winced as he leaned over to indicate a point on the map. “Zachariah, Bartholomew.” He moved to the next red zone. “Uriel.” Another. “Mm…Ezekial? I think Ishim was around here somewhere. A lot of us got thrown into Brookings.”

Dean’s responding stare was half-analytical, half-interrogation-technique. “You mean these are all undead angels?”

“That…could thin the Veil,” Castiel conceded, “if our father brought too many of us back too quickly without giving it time to heal. Usually, Death would repair it, but he is…out of the picture now.”

Gabriel glared at the ceiling. “Way to go, Dad.”

Sam couldn’t argue there. “So, short term goal: kill all the Black Dogs. Long term goal: patch up the Veil.”

“That sounds correct,” Castiel agreed.

“Oh, wow,” Garth sighed. “And here I thought it was just Black Dog mating season.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a few chapters left. Thanks, everyone.
> 
> I won't spoil anything about this season--but, oh man, this season.


	16. Sweet Child O' Mine

Alfie had a sincere interest in meeting Garth, and he harbored it at the same time as he harbored a sincere interest in _not leaving his room._ He didn’t want to talk to Gabriel. He wasn’t up to pretending that he was 100% comfortable around Castiel, which was a lie he’d been upholding admirably. He was even beginning to worry about what the Winchesters would think of his undiagnosed PTSD, given that they’d been through literal Hell for _decades_ and yet seemed more put-together than he did.

The thoughts turned his body leaden—made his brain beg for sleep.

A short hour of unconsciousness later, he realized that sleep left him feeling useless and guilty.

Around lunch, he forced himself into the kitchen to say a quick hello and grab an apple. Garth was, indeed, very pleasant. He had the kind of smile that made a person want to smile in return. However, Alfie booked it out of there the second Gabriel called his name.

This was getting ridiculous.

Four o’clock had come and gone when a knock sounded on Alfie’s door. He considered pretending to be asleep. What a childish notion. And with his youthful face, he couldn’t afford to be any more childish that he had to, lest everyone forget he was a several-millennia old warrior of God. That said, it took more effort than it should have to brave opening the door.

Gabriel stood on the other side.

Alfie almost slammed it shut again out of reflex. This manifested as a flinch, and if he thought for a second Gabriel didn’t notice, he was wrong.

“So…” Gabriel said, shifting surreptitiously, “I can’t call you out for hiding all day without being a hypocrite, but we should probably have ourselves a little chat.”

Alfie attempted to stall. “Is Garth still here?”

“Nope. Took off for to meet with some hunter named _Grange_. He said to tell you goodbye.”

“Oh.” The door handle trembled beneath Alfie’s shaky grip as he fumbled for more stalling tactics. The list came up short. With little other choice, he allowed the door to swing open of its own volition. “Okay. Let’s talk.”

Gabriel nodded, but did not move inside. The gesture offered them both a fast escape. Both wondered who would start this assuredly awkward conversation.

Gabriel rose to the occasion with a great and weary sigh. “Alfie,” he began, “I know you’re not technically a kid and I know it sucks to be treated like one.”

Alfie shifted on his feet. “Then why did you keep me out of the loop? Do you not _trust_ me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gabriel chided. “Of course I trust you, but…” His muscles pulled tight like sailing rigs, braced for a wind to carry him off to parts unknown. “I was trying to _hakuna matata_ my way out of it all.”

Since moving in with Gabriel, Alfie had become fluent in his older brother’s peculiar language. He knew that it was less important to listen to what Gabriel said and more important to listen to how he said it. So, despite the sentence expressing very little in terms of content, the meaning hit Alfie like a revelation. “You’re scared of them—of Lucifer and Michael and Raphael.”

Because Gabriel had been an archangel, even a runaway one, Alfie had always pictured him above the fear and panic Alfie so potently experienced. Gabriel had been the one who smiled. The one who laughed. Gabriel was old and worldly and…and apparently just as screwed-up as Alfie was. As all of them were.

But God-forbid he act like it.

“Being around them—hell, even talking about them hurts,” Gabriel admitted. Verbalizing those emotions filled his stomach with squishy, slimy things that squirmed. “I’d say like being stabbed in the gut, but, well…” He mimed impalement, fingers hovering over the thick scar on his abdomen. “Lucifer. And Raph isn’t far off from trying.”

“I guess I didn’t think about that.” Alfie sunk onto the edge of his bed. He knew, of course, that Lucifer had killed Gabriel. Angel Radio had pitched into a screaming whine with the force of that grief. For ten seconds, Heaven had been deafened by a betrayal and a mourning. The whine had sounded again, as a muted shadow of itself, as Lucifer had asked Michael to step off the playing field, back in Stull Cemetery during the apocalypse-that-wasn’t. Alfie hadn’t understood the depth of it then. He did now. “Do you still love them?”

“Yeah.”

Or at least the idea of them. Gabriel loved brothers that were never coming home, and he knew it, but that didn’t mean he stopped seeing those brothers beneath the warped visages of their new selves. Memories were vicious like that. He wondered if anyone had ever experienced the same illusion around him.

The truth was that those illusions were an inevitable side effect of age and change—mirages of former truths, shining rosy and gossamer over the new reality.

Alfie let out a deep breath. He himself had just seen beneath that curtain. “If you love them, why don’t you want to do something to fix this?”

“I tried,” Gabriel said. He’d been killed trying. “Life lesson #1: Love is duct tape. It’ll fix a hell of a lot, but not everything, even if you’re MacGyver.”

At that moment, Alfie made an unspoken decision. He loved Gabriel. He forgave Gabriel for not telling him about Michael and Lucifer. But while Gabriel was not done running, Alfie certainly was.

###

The breaking point was when Raelyn found the sampler bottle of vodka hidden in Balthazar’s apron pocket. She put their teenage barista of the afternoon at the counter, then summoned him to the back. “We need to talk,” she said. God, she hated those words. It always felt like putting a noose around someone’s neck. It was no different with Balthazar. She continued, “I’ve been going easy on you because I figured something must be up, but I have to draw the line at drinking on the job.”

Balthazar clenched his teeth for a moment. Old sentiments sprang to life, all about hairless apes and their lack of rightful authority over him. For a moment, he’d forgotten he was essentially _one of them_ now, albeit with an infinitely longer memory. Trying to tone it back, he countered, “It’s wasn’t a terribly large amount of alcohol.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Raelyn said. “It’s irresponsible and dangerous. Look, if you need time off to sort something out, just ask. But I don’t need you operating machinery buzzed, and I definitely don’t need my customers wondering why my _barista_ smells like he should be a _bartender_.”

Balthazar focused all his attention the floor, then began counting the tiles. He couldn’t tell her that the alcohol was part of his normal. That he needed it. That he was already sweating, just a little, or that the shakes would start up soon. “It won’t happen again. I promise.”

“Good. Now, I am going to take this” —she held up the bottle— “out of here. Goodnight, Balthazar.”

“Goodnight, Raelyn.”

He leaned back against the sink as the back door swung shut behind her. His spine, knees, and head all ached ferociously. As if to escape the pain, his mind began to wander, providing utterly unhelpful sentiments. “I should leave,” he muttered to himself. “Run off into the night, never to be heard from again.” Damn Brookings. Damn feud. Damn Gabriel for leaving and damn Raphael for coordinating fights and damn Castiel for everything else.

His cursing came to a crashing halt when a sound like an orchestra drum boomed from the back door. And with it came a symphony. A scream. A struggle. A growl. Balthazar turned.

There, half through the door, fingertips barely hanging onto the frame, was Raelyn, painted in red.

He rushed forward to pull her the rest of the way in. The motion wrenched a screech from her larynx. The thing on the other side must have had its teeth in her leg. On the other side of the room, their teenage barista came to check on the noise, and Balthazar had to warn her away. Reaching back, he grabbed the nearest cookie sheet, opened the door, and then banged the creature on the head as hard as he could.

He hit it repeatedly, more forceful each time. “Let. Her. Go!” Rage built in him like magma bubbling to the surface, because if there was anyone who deserved this, it was not Raelyn. He brought the sheet down again, hard enough that it warped. There was no way he was surrendering. His fury _burned._

Within his grasp, the sheet grew warm, first to expected skin temperature, before it climbed toward molten-hot. When the metal struck the beast, on the sixth and final blow _,_ its skin sizzled. The smell of burnt flesh came seconds before the pan cut the beast clean in half.

Balthazar and Raelyn both went limp in shock—one in the emotional sense, and one medically. Between them, the cookie sheet continued to glow a dull red on the floor. The bakery smelt like a butchery. Balthazar flexed unburned hands.

Angel powers. He had his angel powers back.

Raelyn, meanwhile, finally ebbed out of shock—a process than brought with it no small amount of agony. Her leg felt like it was about to fall off. She clutched the limb, as if to keep it attached to the rest of her body, and began to shriek. “What the holy hell was that?!” A deep gasp. “Oh my God! My leg, my leg.”

Balthazar snapped out of his revelation enough to take a hard look at Raelyn’s injury. The dog-beast had punctured the femoral artery. Bloody hell. He sank to her side, balled up his apron, and put pressure against the wound. Warmth continued to linger in his fingertips. Celestial warmth.

Raelyn had given this place her blood, sweat, and tears—Balthazar wasn’t about to stand by while she give it her life, too. He was an angel again. He could heal her.

And then swear her to absolute secrecy because Raphael could _not_ know about this.

Healing took more focus than it ever had. It took pushing and shoving and swearing. The light seemed deadest on clinging to Balthazar. But once it started flowing outward, the energy drained from him like he was little more than a celestial sieve. That brief moment of blinding invincibility came crashing down, leaving nothing more than a shaking alcoholic in withdrawal with his boss’s blood coating his hands, knees, and apron. After a minute, he removed the cloth. The bite had lessened from two-inch-deep to glancing the surface. It would be enough.

“You…what?” Raelyn gasped. Her eyes were wide with both fear and awe, blackened tears of mascara dripping down from them. “How?”

Balthazar fell from his crouch onto his ass, then promptly began to vomit into the nearest trash bin. Violently. When he finished, he wiped his mouth, and asked, “Would you believe me if I told you I was an angel?”

###

Raphael was a man of absolution: he did not make idle threats nor break promises. For those reasons, he found himself at the River Regional Mental Hospital once more. The receptionist informed him that Lucifer was currently in Group Therapy, and though he was more than welcome to visit Michael, he shouldn’t expect much response today.

“Michael,” Raphael greeted, sitting across from the man whom had once been the most powerful being in existence short of God and the Darkness. _Catatonic_ had seemed like such a harsh word initially; Raphael had imagined it must have been an exaggeration.

It was not.

Michael’s head lolled forward, dark eyes like marbles, lolling in their sockets. It was similar to watching a doll. Like Raphael, Michael’s face wasn’t the most recent one, but perhaps a more preferred one. Black-haired and strong-jawed, with wide shoulders, all of which had fallen into minor disrepair over the course of his descent into lunacy.

“I know you’re in there,” Raphael went on. There wasn’t much else to do. “I was told you tackled Lucifer to the ground.”

Nothing.

“Gabriel is on the run again. I don’t suppose it’s much of a surprise. The second voices are raised, he makes himself scarce.”

Michael blinked, slowly, the muscles in his brow giving away the tiniest flutter of _concern._ It was the most reaction Raphael had seen from him yet. Of _course_ it was over Gabriel. Although all the angels were brothers and sisters by name, they were closer to cousins by intimacy of their relationships, except within smaller groups, of which the archangels were the most prominent. Thus, as far as Michael and Lucifer had been concerned, Gabriel was the baby of their tight-knit family, and everyone always paid attention to the baby. Raphael had been the quiet middle-child for almost as long as he could remember.

An uncomfortable burning started in his chest as he stared at Michael, who would react to Gabriel’s _name_ but not Raphael’s actual presence.

“I know that’s the real reason you went through with the apocalypse,” Raphael continued, his voice laced with more vitriol than he had intended. “You would have accepted Lucifer’s offer to walk away if he’d given it half a year earlier. You would have forgiven him anything but Gabriel’s death. Perhaps you would have even forgiven him _my_ death.”

The furrow in Michael’s brow grew deeper. Finally. Progress.

“But I suppose we’ve all been dead, in a way,” Raphael mused callously. “None of our younger siblings remember the kinder version of Lucifer, who cradled their hands in his so that they could hold newborn stars. They don’t remember your obsessive headcounts, ensuring that every last one of them was safe and accounted for. They don’t remember sitting with me in the garden, under trees that didn’t yet exist on Earth, as they marveled at a future that would never be. And how very few remember the Gabriel Fledgling Express, tearing through the universe faster than many of them would ever fly again.

“You said all of those memories needed to disappear because we needed to be soldiers instead, and then we appointed Naomi, whose first act by necessity was to erase herself completely from living memory. It took less than a week for our family to disintegrate.”

And then Gabriel had left.

And Raphael had stood by Michael’s side, loyal, even as the world fell apart.

“The most I ever felt like myself,” Raphael bit, “was after you and Lucifer were both trapped in Hell.”

Michael blinked again, and for a moment, lucidness returned to his expression, though his head continued to loll atop his neck. He rasped, with the upmost certainty, four words: “I’m still _in_ Hell.”

The energy seeped from Raphael’s body, leaving him as cold and empty as a finished bottle of whisky. Michael sincerely didn’t believe any of this was real—that it was no more than another one of Lucifer’s illusions. Raphael debated which would be worse: for Michael to continue believing that, or to convince him otherwise. In the end, Raphael uttered vaguely, “I suppose you are,” and then left.

Behind him, Michael’s eyes lost their clarity.

###

Tabula Rasa closed for the night, though it was not empty. Balthazar and Raelyn peered across the table at each other, two cups of soothing herbal tea between them. The tea did not suit their respective styles, but nevertheless felt appropriate for the moment—a situational craving. Raelyn’s make-up was almost 100% absent at this point, washed away by tears, perspiration, and an invigorating dunk in some cold water. Balthazar’s hands trembled and sweat blotched his uniform with dark stains. He looked like the dead man he should have been were it not for the Second Semi-Angelic Coming.

Raelyn leveled him with a half-manic stare. “Monsters?”

“Are real,” Balthazar confirmed.

“And you…?”

“I’m also real.”

“Not what I meant.” Leaning forward—and then promptly leaning back again as if fearing that getting closer was a dangerous mistake—Raelyn considered her next words prudently. The first three phrases in her head would have had her burned for heresy at one point in history. “You said you were an _angel_.”

“Oh, relax,” Balthazar said, dropping his cup of tea onto the table. Green liquid splashed onto the faux wood. “I wasn’t one of the _smitey_ ones. Honestly, I had more of a drinking problem then than I do now. Do you know how much alcohol it takes to get an angel drunk?”

“You’re joking.”

“About the alcohol? Definitely not.” The acidic taste lingering in his mouth reminded him that his tolerance wasn’t what it once was.

“Please tell me you’re not someone’s guardian angel.”

It was the best joke Balthazar had heard all day. “Goodness, _no._ I’m not even supposed to be an angel at all anymore. Long story, but Dad cut the power and put us all in the time out corner, as far as I know.”

“‘Dad’ as in God.”

“Unfortunately.”

“So then Heaven and Hell are…” Her words tripped over themselves as she struggled to fight the sickness in her stomach. She tapped a nail on the ceramic rim of her cup, carefully keeping her eyes down in case Balthazar could somehow see her thoughts—could see every rude customer who refused to call her “she,” the sidewalk preacher who had harassed her on her first trip to New York City, and really any given minute of high school. She cleared her throat. “Heaven and Hell are real.”

Balthazar’s voice became unexpectedly hard. “Hell is nothing you need to worry about, Raelyn, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Apparently, she was that obvious. She fought to crack a smile regardless. “Thanks.”

“No need. I wish you already knew that.” Balthazar rested his head atop his palm, as though it were a great weight. “I can tell you you’re a better person than half the angels.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“It’s not something we exactly announce. And to be fair, the application asked for my ethnicity and the gender I identify as—it didn’t ask if I was formerly of the Heavenly Host. And I do mean _formerly_.” He left out the icky part about dying.

At final count, it took Raelyn fifty-two minutes and eleven seconds to transition from supernatural shock to grousing that her guardian angel doubled as her drunken barista. “Does this have something to do with why you, Gabe, and Raphael have all be acting weird AF?” She froze as soon as the last syllable left her lips. A little lightbulb blinked on in her head. “Hold up. No. No way. Gabriel. Raphael. They’re not…?”

“What do _you_ think?” Balthazar gave a knowing smirk. “But if you want to give Gabriel a ring to confirm your suspicions, please pretend to be hysterical about it, because he doesn’t handle crying well, and that’s what he deserves for not answering my calls.”

Raelyn did, in fact, consider it for a moment, before deciding that was 99 kinds of potential family drama she did not want to be involved with. She raised her hands in surrender. “I’m going to wait on that one.”

“Suit yourself.” Balthazar winced at the taste of the herbal tea. Sometimes he missed the days when the only flavor was _molecules_. The angelic high had left him with a very human crash. With the truth out in the open, the cheery yellows of the room seemed sallower. Colorful specks of local art concealed elaborate wards. The mat beneath the front door proclaimed “Welcome!” on one side and held a devil’s trap on the other.

“What happens now?” Raelyn wondered. “I mean, there are _monsters_ out there and my barista is a literal angel and…how many angels actually come through here?”

Balthazar held back a shallow laugh. “In the last week? Nine. There’s a bit of a crisis on.” He shouldn’t have been telling her any of this, but it was all bottled up tighter than champagne, and he had no one else who would listen. Gabriel wouldn’t pick up the phone. Raphael would try to use him as an instrument of war. Maybe Alfie, but Balthazar had heard the start of some impressive histrionics last he’d called. So he was left with Raelyn and a cup of tea that tasted like a freshly mown lawn. “I’ve seen tamer episodes of Jerry Springer.”

“Raphael said to call him if we saw dogs. Call me crazy, but I’m guessing this is what he meant.”

“Just do me a favor,” said Balthazar. He wasn’t well-suited to displaying sincerity, but he tried nonetheless. “If you call him in, call me out. Because I am not going to get dragged into another family feud.”

After all, he preferred to remain alive.

###

Alfie felt very much like an actual teenager for once; faking slumber and sneaking out far past curfew.

At exactly 2:04 A.M., he pressed _send_ on a text to Balthazar, who was most likely sleeping by then, due to an early morning shift. Alfie then slipped out of his room as silently as possible to make his way toward the garage. The deep shadows ensnaring the bunker lent it a forbidding aura. His every step sounded like a bass drum to his ears. Dark, aggressive shapes crowded the garage by the light of his phone—old vehicles with sharp angles and the occasional hood ornament. A faint scuffling sound from the hall behind forced him to duck behind a car, smothering the light with his hand.

The shadows disappeared into the pitch black, then grew again with the introduction of a new light source. It scanned across the rows the way a watchtower’s beam might sweep over prison grounds. Eventually, it swept over him.

“ _Alfie?”_ a gravelly voice asked with the utmost incredulity.

 _“Castiel?”_ Alfie straightened up and squinted into the light. He could see the outline of a trench coat. “Um…I guess you won hide and seek?”

“We were not playing hide and seek,” Castiel stated, closer to admonishment than confusion. “What are you doing here in the middle of the night?”

Alfie stood and dusted off his jeans. “I…left something in the car.”

“Then why did you hide when I walked in?”

“Instinct?” Alfie attempted to sound certain and just a tad supercilious, as if it should be obvious. He’d learned that from his coworkers at Peace-a-Pizza. “Why are _you_ here?”

Castiel raised an eyebrow, opened his mouth to lie, and then reconsidered. “I overheard you and Gabriel talking about Lucifer’s return. I found the location on Gabriel’s phone and was planning to ensure that Lucifer doesn’t become a threat.”

Alfie’s shoulder sagged at the weight of his discovered lie. “Dean said you would do this if you found out.”

“Dean knows me very well.”

“I’ve noticed.” It was almost impossible not to. Even when they fought, it was clear that the other knew all of the opposing arguments before they were spoken. It had taken three minutes to see why their father had tacked “Winchester” on at the end of Castiel’s name. “I’ll be honest then. We need Gabriel, Michael, Lucifer, and Raphael to talk to each other. That’s the only way we will avert more bloodshed. And the only way Gabriel will get anywhere near any of them—”

“Is if he thinks you’re in danger.” Castiel blinked and tilted his head. “That is surprisingly manipulative of you.”

“I know, and it makes me sick just thinking about it,” Alfie admitted, “but the way things are now isn’t good for _any_ of us, Gabriel included. And I know the second he finds out, he’ll never talk to me again, but if there is even the slightest chance they could work this out…”

“I know,” Castiel agreed. “Some risks are worth taking.” He inclined his head in the direction of a pale green sedan that, knowing Dean, worked perfectly despite its age. The man couldn’t leave a car in need. “If we are travelling to the same place, it would be more economically efficient to take the same vehicle.”

Alfie offered a weak smile. “Family road trip.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, no one needed their emotions intact, right? Because if you did, you'd be watching the wrong show.
> 
> I have to say, I've always really liked Supernatural's use of parallels. Sometimes blunt ones. Sometimes subtle ones.
> 
> Before I started this fic, I rewatched a lot of episodes to get a feel for the characters again. I must have seen the ending to Hammer of the Gods 10 times. And then I realized that Gabriel's conversation with Lucifer ran parallel to Lucifer's conversation with Michael.
> 
> Gabriel told Lucifer, "No one makes us do anything."
> 
> And then Lucifer told Michael, "We're brothers. Let's just walk off the chessboard."
> 
> I like to think that this is direct cause and effect. That Lucifer was devastated about killing Gabriel, and realized that their stupid war wasn't worth another one of his brothers, and so tried to make the same deal that Gabriel had made him. And I love both of those scenes because we see that they don't all hate each other, no matter what else has happened.
> 
> Another parallel I really like is this one: "I just want it to be over." Both Gabriel and Raphael said it when referring to the apocalypse. At one point, they had very similar mindsets. I'm truly sad they didn't make Raphael's character as complex as it should have been. That's why I've been putting so much work into it here. I mean, he's a dick, but he's trying.
> 
> And as always--thanks.


	17. Amazing Grace

There were no warm, thrumming, sun-shiny mornings for Balthazar. He couldn’t tell if the ringing in the room was his alarm or his brain. Admittedly, after his late evening tea time with Raelyn, he’d prioritized sauntering home and getting as drunk as he could reasonably get away with. He’d tried wheedling Raelyn into closing up shop the next day, since they’d both been so viciously attacked, but she was a woman of determination. She’d work the shop alone if she had to. And, really, Balthazar was a bastard, but he wasn’t _that much_ of a bastard.

Hence, Baltahzar was going into work with a decent hangover, which he planned to alleviate with at least two espressos. He finally determined that it was, in fact, his phone alarm doing the ringing, and managed to silence it. An alert popped up in its place.

One new text message. Received at 2:04 A.M.

Squinting at the screen, he tried to make out the letters.

_From: Alfie._

_I just thought someone should know: I’m going to see Michael and Lucifer. Maybe there’s a way to stop this from becoming a war._

Balthazar blinked, repeatedly, hoping that he’d read that wrong—that his hangover had somehow mutated an innocent text into this terrifying combination of words. No such luck. He jolted into motion fast enough that a trickle of vomit found its way into his mouth. The hell he was going to let Alfie throw himself into this. Maybe, if he was very, very lucky, and if Alfie was still a cautious driver, he would get there first.

###

Nothing was immediately wrong. Unlike Balthazar, Gabriel didn’t wake up to any screaming alarms, in his head or otherwise. He slept in until seven, which was far later than his baking schedule usually allowed for, then instinctively reached for the bottle of painkillers. He paused with his arm outstretched, testing its motion.

His ribs were healing.

If he closed his eyes, he could feel the tiniest shred of Grace flickering like a sparkler—shiny, but ultimately close to harmless. It was a start.

Like many people of this bright and shining technological age, his second reflex was to grab his cell phone, usually left charging next to the painkillers. Not today. The bedside table stood empty. This itself was not concerning. He’d been known to let the device wander off, sometimes to strange locations, like the one occasion when it had ended up in the pantry. It was probably out in the den, squeezed between the couch cushions.

So, casually, he wandered out into the kitchen, made breakfast, tried and failed to find his phone, bugged Sam on his way to his workout, bantered with Dean, attributed Alfie’s absence to the boy sleeping in like a proper teenager for once, and absolutely did not panic until Dean ran into his room at nine, demanding, “Have you seen Cas?”

A jolt went up Gabriel’s spine, and he almost forgot that his ribs were still supposed to be broken. Couldn’t let a continuity error like _that_ slip. “Lost your man already?”

“I’m not joking, Gabriel,” Dean insisted, stomping over. “Cas is _gone._ No note, his phone is off, and there’s a car missing from the garage.”

Attention: grabbed. Gabriel’s wings trembled with the urge to take flight. “ _That’s_ not good.” A second, daunting realization hit him in the chest. “Wait. Have you seen Alfie?”

“No.” They were both down the hall in seconds. Gabriel knocked on the door. “Alfie?” No response. “Alfie!” He broke into the room to find it empty. “ _Very_ bad.”

“So what?” Dean asked. “They both ran off? To _where?_ ”

“I don’t know.” Gabriel searched Alfie’s room quickly, then found his own phone on the dresser table. “What the—? He stole my phone.”

“Is there a note on it?”

“Nada. A call from him, but no message.” Gabriel wasted no time scrolling to Alfie’s contact and pressing _call._ It rang. That was a small blessing. The other end picked up.

“About time,” replied a voice that was definitely not Alfie. The British accent gave it away.

“Balthazar?! What the hell are you doing with Alfie’s phone? Where is he?”

“Check again, Oompa Loompa. You called _my_ phone.”

Gabriel looked at the screen, which continued to claim he was calling Alfie. He then checked the number attached. It was not Alfie’s number. “The sneaky brat changed my contacts.”

“And not for a prank, I’m afraid.” Gabriel could practically hear Balthazar’s blood pressure rising. “I got a text from him this morning. He said he was going to visit _Michael and Lucifer_ to…end the war before it started or some such nonsense _._ ”

“What.”

“I’m on the road as we speak to stage an intervention.” Indeed, an engine rumbled in the background. At a guess, Balthazar was speeding. “Funny, Alfie must have thought the only way you would pick up my call is if he changed my name to his. How sad it is that he was correct, you utter bastard.”

“There’s no way Alfie trusted you over me.”

“As much as I’d love to love to hear you call me a turncoat again, I have to point out that there are more important matters at hand. Does Alfie have his powers?”

“No.”

“Not that you know of, at least,” Balthazar corrected. “I thought he might have gotten them back and decided take our lovely older brothers out of the picture.”

“Alfie wouldn’t do that.”

“You didn’t think he’d run off without telling you, either. But the kicker is: I got _my_ wings back last night. I don’t want to think of what’s going to happen if Alfie walks in there only to find out that Michael and Lucifer are up and running as well.” Balthazar paused for a minute to let that sink in. “So as much as I don’t want to fight, I will if I have to, because I’m not a _bloody coward_. Can you say the same?”

And then Balthazar hung up, signaling the end of that discussion.

Gabriel turned to Dean with a severely neutral expression that Dean had come to associate with absolute horror. Gaze dead. Mouth flat. No eye contact. Gabriel was too prideful to ever admit to fear, even in as silent a way as that. He said, with equal neutrality, “They’re _Little-Miss-Sunshine-_ ing it right to Lucifer and Michael for whatever loony plan they’ve concocted. And to put the cherry on top: Balthazar’s on his way to stage an intervention. I don’t think he realizes Castiel’s going to be there, so that will be fun.”

“Son of a bitch.” Times like these, Dean sincerely believed that smacking his head against a brick wall would be less painful than continuing to keep the friends that he did. “Do you know Alfie’s number?”

“I’m not completely irresponsible,” Gabriel snipped, beginning to dial. The phone didn’t even ring. Voicemail answered instead. The language in Gabriel’s internal monologue turned more colorful than the gay pride flag. A few millennia on Earth had provided a wide array of curse words, and he was thinking all of them as he left his message. “Alfie Angelino, you call me the minute you get this.”

Dean would have mocked Gabriel about sounding like a dad if anxiety wasn’t clawing his intestines to ribbons. Human or not, Castiel and Lucifer were never a good mix, let alone with Michael thrown in. “I’m going after them in case Raphael finds a way to track Cas down again. Where are they?”

“River Regional Mental Hospital in Aberdeen.”

“You’re kidding me.” Gabriel’s expression suggested otherwise. Dean could have pulled out his hair. “That’s where Garth and his new hunting buddy are. I can’t believe Cas just walked into Black Dog territory.”

“Cas _and_ Alfie,” Gabriel amended. “I knew Castiel was nuts, but Alfie? Kid usually has his head on his shoulders.”

“And yet they’re going to confront Michael and Lucifer, with Raphael on their tail, into a place with Black Dogs who might be sniffing out alive-again angels. This is, like, the worst idea.” Big guns. Dean was going to have to pack big guns. He forced himself to take deep breaths. Panicking never got him anywhere. Not in this life. “Okay. I’ll call Garth, see if he can talk Cas, Alfie, and Balthazar down from doing anything stupid. Well, stupid _er_. With any luck, they’ll still be in one piece when I get there.”

“And then what?” Gabriel asked. “They’re not kids out past curfew. You really think you’re gonna go there, slap them on the wrist, and then they’ll let you drag them back here?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not going to sit on my ass!” Dean threw his hands up in frustration. “Family’s not family just when it’s convenient, Gabriel. So I don’t care if they did a dumb thing. I don’t want that dumb thing to get them dead.”

“Bull,” Gabriel called. “You always ask people to do dumb things that kill them. Hell, you’re looking at a perfect example.”

“I don’t have time for this,” Dean snapped. “I don’t know why I thought you’d change. Cas and Alfie are in trouble, and it’s like you don’t even care.”

“I care,” Gabriel growled. “Of course I care about Cas and Alfie. I just…don’t think this is a good plan.”

“Yeah, that’s _convincing_.” Dean began to storm away. Over his shoulder, he called. “Just…stay in the bunker.”

“All that righteous rigmarole and you’re telling me to _stay here?_ ”

“You’re a little short on firepower right now and I don’t need the liability.”

Gabriel glared wholeheartedly at the ground. He’d never admit it out loud, but Dean Winchester was the only human who could make him feel guilty about anything. And right now, he felt like the kind of craptastic older brother he’d promised not to be this time around. Damn it. Gabriel sighed and ran his hands through his hair.

“What if I said I knew where there was a stash of ammo, locked and loaded?” he asked. While his dash of Grace could maybe heal a few minor injuries and not much more, Gabriel had always been OCD about keeping a few tricks up his sleeve.

Dean took the bait. “What are you talking about?”

“Back when I was the Trickster,” Gabriel explained, “I hid tons of trinkets all over the world. Little bits of Grace and Old Norse Magic. Back-up plans. Anyway, there are some tucked away nearby, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few are collecting cobwebs in your clubhouse storage. It would be enough to handle a few Black Dogs and whatever Raphael could throw at us.”

“You’re serious.”

“ _Dead_ ,” Gabriel replied with a faded but nonetheless wicked grin. It veiled the fact that his nerves were doing the Macarena. “But just so we’re clear, this is _exactly_ why I didn’t let slip that the terrible two were back in the first place.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Is that an ‘I told you so?’”

“Oh, it’s the ‘I told you so’ of all ‘I told you so’s,” Gabriel assured. “Now lets raid the storage room and rescue ourselves some idiots.”

###

To put it kindly: Raphael was a hoarder. An information hoarder. His laptop started alerting him of his dwindling storage capacity last week, he kept a meticulous calendar, a journal that bordered on neurotic, spreadsheets galore, and no fewer than six maps. A map for angels, a map for demon sightings and gates to Hell, a map for Black Dogs, and recently a map for Castiel. It hadn’t been a week since he had started to see an overlap between his angel map and his Black Dog map. And now, a third had decided to join the party.

According to Raphael’s be-spelled map, Castiel was out of his warded box and was on the move again, _towards_ Raphael. Or, more specifically, towards the River Regional Mental Hospital. Raphael currently had all three overlapping maps spread out in his backset, observing them as he loitered in the hospital parking lot. He had few doubts this was coincidence.

A time-forgotten car the color of pea soup rolled into place on the other side of the lot. There must have been something about possessing the last name Winchester that bestowed upon a person a penchant for old cars. Raphael snuck out of his own car and crept closer, ducking behind the rows of vehicles. Spotting Castiel’s familiar face, Raphael found a strategic post behind a large van. The seconds ticked by. The footsteps grew closer.

The minute Castiel was in his sights, Raphael struck. He pulled a knife and aimed for Castiel’s throat. All in silence. He would not make the mistake of breaking into monologue. Castiel, however, had better honed reflexes than Raphael would have expected, and managed to escape with the barest of scratches.

When Castiel saw his attacker, he forced his expression to remain calm. He hadn’t wavered when Raphael was an archangel, and he would not now. He asked, “How did you find me? I’m warded.”

“Not against everything,” Raphael responded. “I’m sorry, _brother,_ I can’t let you leave. You see, I have talked to the other former angels, and they all agree on one detail: that your very name brings death and war. That would be detrimental to the new peace I am working so hard to establish.”

“What you are doing is not peaceful.”

“Peace hardly ever comes from peaceful actions.” Raphael made another lunge, grabbing a hold of Castiel’s arm and bending it backward until it snapped and Castiel screamed. Raphael raised his knife.

An unanticipated weight threw itself at his back, knocking him off balance. He attempted to stab the knife backwards toward this new assailant. Aching pain stabbed through his tendons as a strong grip grabbed his wrist, twisted it, and then snatched the blade from his loosened grip. He strained his neck to peer upward.

Garth. And Alfie.

Damn it.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Garth interceded, waving the hand not holding Raphael’s knife. “Break it up, fellas. What’s going on here? Castiel? Alfie? Grange?”

“ _Grange?”_ Castiel repeated. “Garth, this is Raphael. Our brother.”

While Garth processed that, Alfie checked over Castiel’s arm. Definitely broken. Damn it. All he’d planned for today was a quiet wait in the car until Gabriel showed up— _if_ he showed up. Alfie wasn’t positive how deeply Gabriel’s aversion to his older brothers lay. A strong, cold breeze blew by, biting at Alfie’s skin and eliciting a shiver. So now, cold and exhausted and riding the last leg of the adrenaline chain, Alfie felt his soul _snap,_ as loudly and as painfully as Castiel’s arm.

“What the hell?” he demanded of Raphael, stepping forward with all the aggression of a small cat who truly believed it was a lion. Damn the hierarchy. Damn civil behavior. Damn trying to be the friggin’ adult when no one else was bothering. His angelic vernacular slipped—neutral, clean words became bloated with overwhelming emotion. “I’m so sick of your games. We’re your family, not your chess pieces, you dick.”

“Alfie,” rumbled Raphael, “back down.”

“No!” Alfie protested. Heat built inside his core, like the start of a nuclear meltdown. The tips of his fingers tingled. “You back down. I’m not letting anyone else get hurt. We got a second chance and you’re _wasting it_ by doing the same damn thing that put us here in the first place.”

“ _Samandriel_ ,” Raphael barked, the way a parent would call a naughty child’s full name. “This isn’t your fight.”

“You made it my fight. You made it everyone’s fight. And I hate that.” The heat spread into Alfie’s extremities. He was convinced he was about to vomit lava. Panic buzzed beneath the molten pressure, approaching a full-on attack.

“Samandriel—”

If only Alfie could get rid of this—the panic and fear and grief. Just throw it out like last week’s trash.

“—this is for your own good—”

It was never for his own good. Alfie was Heaven’s background noise. But he was _done_ with that. The pressure overwhelmed him. And Alfie couldn’t take it anymore.

He pushed it all away.

The raw sorrow shot forward as a wall of light that threw Raphael to the ground, then dragged him across the pavement for good measurement. Alfie felt the familiar weight of wings return to his back. Warmth trickled from his eyes—not celestial power, but very human emotion. Tears. He collapsed to the ground, shaking, and still feeling like he might throw up. He had barely enough breath to gasp, “Let the war end.”

Raphael blinked, heavily, stunted by a mild concussion. “You have your Grace back.”

“Trust me,” Alfie coughed, “I’m just as surprised as you are.”

Garth had spent the last five minutes deciding this was a family ordeal he should not be involved in, but he drew the line when it came to violence. As Raphael fought his way back to a standing position, Garth leapt between them all. “Listen,” he pleaded, “maybe it’s not my place, but I’m not gonna watch you tear each other to confetti. Forgiveness and understanding are two of the most powerful forces on Earth. Why don’t we all sit down and talk?”

“Talking won’t solve this,” Raphael asserted. He glared at Castiel, then turned his gaze toward Alfie. “If you think I’m the warmonger, you should recall who you’re standing next to. I am _preventing_ another war.”

“It doesn’t look like it,” Alfie protested.

“Doesn’t it?” Raphael motioned toward the building. “I am talking with Michael and Lucifer to establish peace, which is more than can be said for Gabriel, who only ever runs and hides. I am trying to stop a man who has let loose Leviathans, killed hundreds of our brothers and sisters, repeatedly worked with the demon who _tortured you_ , allowed the angels to be cast out of Heaven, and so many more bad deeds than his few good acts can balance out.

“Meanwhile, I have told Naomi to keep her distance from you, and established territories to prevent unnecessary quarrels. My network has given our family jobs and shelter and assistance to make it through this difficult situation. And I am currently hunting the multitudes of Black Dogs that have been drawn to our locations after our rebirths weakened the Veil. Tell me again that I do not want to help our family.”

Alfie continued to glare in defiance. At his older brother. Who could resume being an archangel in the indefinite future. Thank goodness for adrenaline. Otherwise he would have quavered. “Because from this side, it looks like you are building an army and carrying out a vendetta. It looks like you’d forgive anyone for all their crimes, no matter how severe, except for the one angel who brought you down. That’s not protection. That’s revenge.”

“I don’t think you understand the severity of the situation,” Raphael replied. “You have your Grace back. I suspect Gabriel does as well. Others will regain theirs eventually. We need harmonious coexistence before then, because what happens next won’t be as simple as an apocalypse. There are two sides in an apocalypse. We are so splintered that this would be endless bloodshed. There would _never_ be peace.” Raphael did not _do_ sentiment. Nevertheless, he felt it break into his voice. “Do you not want peace?”

“I do,” Alfie agreed. “We all do. Gabriel does. Castiel does. Every. Side. Wants. Peace.” Alfie felt like he was hamming a particularly dull nail into a thick block of wood. “That’s why I’m asking you to start with forgiveness.”

“I’m sorry, Alfie, but that is not how this world works.” And before Alfie could so much as flinch, Raphael had pulled a gun. Garth made a fast, desperate move to disarm him. The jostling nudged the direction of the bullet as it exploded out of the chamber. It was meant for Castiel. But it was heading for Alfie.

And he’d just used up every flicker of his Grace.


	18. My Heart Will Go On

Crashing a car imparts a distinct feeling. Every nerve is electrified, every heartbeat is a bass drum, gravity surrenders its steady hold to momentum’s crushing embrace. Despite possessing an intact vehicle, Balthazar was experiencing some very car-crash feelings.

Alfie. Gun. Bullet.

Mixing adrenaline and Grace was not unlike mixing Red Bull and vodka—

exhilarating and exhausting and probably not good for his health. It did, however, get his wings working well enough to jolt him across the parking lot and seize the bullet centimeters from Alfie’s chest. The lead sizzled against his palm.

Then, burning up his reserves, Balthazar managed to shove Alfie into the back seat as the car continued rolling on behind him, driven only by kinetic energy. His first instinct was to leave—to let Castiel and Raphael duke it out for old time’s sake. It wasn’t his conscience that stopped him from following that instinct. Rather, it was the mildly terrifying idea of being on the collective bad sides of Gabriel, Dean, and Sam for abandoning their injured friend in a parking lot with his gun-toting, homicidal brother.

Archangels and Winchesters were not forces to be trifled with lightly.

Balthazar shoved Castiel into the back seat with Alfie, jumped behind the wheel, and peeled out of the parking lot fast enough that his tires squealed. He harbored no illusions that his Grace continued to remain a secret from Raphael. Or Alfie. Or Castiel. Those chances were blown sky high.

Damn it. He really hadn’t wanted to get involved again.

“Balthazar?!” Alfie choked, twisting his neck at whiplash speeds. “What—how—?”

The situation dawned on Castiel belatedly, in part due to the aggravated concussion. “You saved us? You’re an angel again.”

“Keep that in mind before you say anything that will make me want to smite you,” Balthazar threatened in reply. “And Alfie, what the hell did you think you were doing?”

“I had a plan,” Alfie stated, being very clearly vague.

“Well, it wasn’t a very good plan, was it?”

“It…went awry.” Alfie glanced out the back window, checking for any signs of company.

“Yes. I saw that. Care to tell me what was _supposed_ to happen?”

Alfie fiddled with the sleeve of his hoodie. “No?”

“That was rhetorical.”

Rhetorical questions were not a concept Alfie regarded with particular fondness. They asked for opinion, but demanded submission. Shoulders slumped, Alfie responded, “I thought if we could put all four archangels in a room together, they could finally talk things out, and once they stopped fighting with each other, no one else would get hurt.”

“That plan’s about as childish as your face.”

“No. It’s not.”

Alfie’s eyes bore into Balthazar’s through the reflection in the rearview mirror. They sung of stars voids, miracles and tragedies, time long gone and a few million years crammed into a teenage body. Probably the stomach, Balthazar thought—teenage boys were, after all, quite renowned for having endless stomachs. Pulled in by the gravity of that expression, Balthazar remained quiet as Alfie explained.

“I know we don’t matter to them as much as they matter to each other. That could work in our favor. I think if they had to choose, they’d pick each other over whatever dispute they have with any of us. Without any galvanization, our wars would go back to being petty interpersonal fights.”

Alfie spoke with the lack of feeling one would use to read a bullet-point list or a school dress code. Cold. Formally. With a considerably more advanced vocabulary than the teenager he was masquerading as. The way he would have spoken a century ago, before the Heavenly Host had free will. Balthazar did not like it.

“What about when everyone has their Grace back?” Balthazar argued. “It’s my experience that weapons of mass destruction can turn any squabble into an act of war fairly fast. And once Heaven is in reach again…well, that’s another can of some very nasty worms.”

Under his breath, Castiel said, “We do always seem to find new fights.”

“Because _some people_ ,” Balthazar hissed, “impale their _friends_ for trying to _help._ ” Balthazar took a turn more sharply than necessary, jostling Castiel’s broken arm. “Alfie, I’m going to tell you now, if another war is started, Castiel will be at the center of it. He always is.”

“Then why didn’t you leave me there?!” Castiel spat. “If you hate me so much, why didn’t you drive off with Alfie and let Raphael finish what he started?”

“Because, for some reason, Gabriel still thinks you’re worth the air you breathe, and I’d rather not be trapped in a reality bubble for a few centuries once he’s up to snuff.” Balthazar paused to let that sink in. In the rearview, he caught any trace of hope for redemption drain from Castiel’s face. It was hard to imagine they’d once been inseparable. “Believe me, otherwise, I wouldn’t have hesitated.”

A droning silence followed the declaration. Castiel focused on the trees whirring by outside. Balthazar barely refrained from honking at any car that dared to drive under 70mph while in front of him. And Alfie’s gut sank as he wondered, briefly, if his life would be more peaceful if he stopped standing beside Castiel. Because if Raphael and Balthazar were right about one thing, it was that Castiel always navigated his way back into the middle of the biggest fight on the playground.

Trying to distract himself from this uncomfortable realization, Alfie cleared his throat and asked, “Where are we going?”

“To find a decent place to wait in until your friends show up to collect you,” Balthazar replied. “I’m almost positive you’re about to be grounded for life _._ ”

###

“You’re grounded for life,” Gabriel declared into his phone, held aloft in the middle of the car so that everyone could participate in the conversation. Although, at this point, it was mostly Gabriel. “And, damn it, Cas, if I could, I’d ground you, too. You’re lucky it’s your arm that’s broken and not your neck. What got into your funny little heads and made you think this was a good idea?”

“I needed to be sure that neither Lucifer nor Michael would become a threat,” Castiel replied.

Sam was uneasy about the phrasing. “That sounds a lot like you were just going to walk right in and kill them.”

“I was going to _detain_ them,” Castiel corrected. “I’m familiar with the regulations at these establishments. It wouldn’t be too difficult to convince the staff that Michael and Lucifer need to be kept longer, in higher security. I brought the appropriate spells to hinder their Grace should it start to return. It’s not enough to hold back the full strength of an archangel, but it would give us warning.”

“Look,” Dean said, “if Chuck went through the trouble of taking their Grace and locking them in a psych ward, I’m pretty sure he’s not about to hand superpowers back to them anytime soon. None of the other angels have their Grace back, right? Who’s to say it won’t stay that way?”

There was a very long pause. Dean and Sam got the distinct impression that everyone on the other side of the line was exchanging glances.

“Actually…” Alfie trailed. “I do. A little. It came back when Raphael was trying to kill Castiel.”

“Okay, well, that’s news,” Dean commented. “Means we could be a few months short of having a lot of pissed off angels on our hands. Again. Anyone else?”

Another long pause, then a grouchy, British “Fine.” Balthazar neared the phone, having been standing as far away from Castiel as he could manage in the small motel room they’d rented. “Mine’s been back since last night. One of the Black Dogs came sniffing around Tabula Rasa. Raelyn almost lost a leg, but a nice celestial plaster did the trick. I’m sure Gabriel will be getting a very interesting call any day now.”

“Raelyn?” Sam asked. The name was unfamiliar.

“Our boss,” Gabriel replied. He redirected his attention to the phone. “How did she handle it?”

“Shockingly well,” Balthazar replied, “although I think she’s under the impression I’m her alcoholic guardian angel, no matter how much I tell her otherwise.”

Gabriel cracked a smile. He could imagine.

“And in the interest of full disclosure,” Balthazar said, in an effort to redirect the spotlight from himself, “if we’re talking about who has their Grace back and who doesn’t—”

 _Crap on a cracker._ Gabriel saw where this was going. “Unless its Raphael, Michael, or Lucifer,” he interrupted, “I don’t think that’s top priority right now.”

“I kind of disagree,” said Sam. “I mean, most of these angels are going to have vendettas, so we need to know who to watch out for.”

Either it was Gabriel’s imagination, or he could hear Balthazar’s lips twist into a sadistic smile. Busted. “That’s _true._ Well, Gabriel, have any vendettas we should know about?”

“Hold on. What?” Sam demanded.

Gabriel glowered at the phone so fiercely that, had _all_ of his Grace been present and accounted for, it would have exploded. “…You’re a slimy bastard.”

“And you’re a lying liar who lies,” Balthazar countered. “Now, I believe that’s our cue to hang up. Talk to you boys later. Ta.”

The line clicked dead. Gabriel continued to seethe at it. Balthazar had made it back into his good books for all of ten seconds before ripping himself back out again.

“What the hell, man?” Sam asked. “You have your Grace back? So this was all another trick?”

“Oh, please,” Gabriel snapped. “You think if I was an archangel again I’d be slumming it in the backseat, up to my neck in temperamental Old Norse magic?” He jangled the trinkets borrowed from the bunker’s storage, most of which hung around his throat. Spells inked in permanent marker traced up his arms to counteract the negative side-effects. The black edges peaked out from the edges of his cuffs, precise and well-calculated. Sam had taken for granted all of the research Gabriel must have done to masquerade as Loki, until he’d observed those marks being so cautiously applied. This didn’t feel like a trick, and Gabriel bore the marks of exhaustion more commonly seen on the parents of newborn babies as he explained, “I got a speck of my Grace back and I burned it all flying Cassie-boy away from Raphael. I can’t even snap my ribs back into full working order.”

“But why keep it a secret?” Sam wondered. Better to cut off Dean, who was teetering toward a tirade, then to throw Gabriel into a full-on fight while strung out on magic.

“Because if people knew I had juice, they’d want me to _lead,_ ” Gabriel snipped. “Do you really think that would end well? I can’t keep track of Alfie, let alone entire garrisons of lost angels.”

“Not with that attitude,” Dean pitched in, doing his best impression of a soccer mom, with an extra side of scorn.

Gabriel did not take to that kindly. “Listen up, you wannabe _Rebel Without a Cause_. I’m not going to tell them all to bow down and listen up. Not a big fan of dictatorships here, and I don’t preach what I don’t believe.”

“I’m not saying be a dictator, but—”

“But _nothing._ ” Gabriel leaned back definitively. A passerby might even call it sulking. An uncomfortable tingling rattled around inside his chest. Guilt. He stared out the window in the hopes of distracting himself. He blamed his moodiness on the Old Norse bits and bobs attached to his person. “I’ve screwed up their lives enough already. Now can we pull over? I have to use the bathroom, unless you think I’m _tricking you_.”

Dean rolled his eyes, but headed for the next exit. This conversation wasn’t over yet. He’d spent enough time as the fake FBI to know when people were hiding something, and Gabriel’s face spoke volumes.

###

Lucifer enjoyed keeping secrets for a very simple reason: they felt like power. And he was short on power these days.

Secret #1: Although he hadn’t _desired_ to wind up at River Regional, it wasn’t completely unintentional. He’d woken up to his version of Michael—still drooling and bleary-eyed—and had gotten a tad…territorial. It was this or jail time, and he refused to be put in another Cage, even a mortal one.

River Regional was not freedom, _per se_ , but he’d take orderlies over iron bars.

This all should have been tricky to manage. It should have taken some exemplary acting. It did not. His brand new ID came laden with a long history of mental health issues—one of Dad’s little jokes, he supposed. So he’d hammed up his Devil act, scribbled Enochian on the walls in crayon, and had a few chit-chats with their former resident ghost for the first two weeks (leading to no less than three small fires), before feigning a slow recovery. And, _voila_ , here he was, on his best behavior, downing the pills even when they made him feel like he was trudging through swamp water. Playing his cards right. Because this was a game he knew well.

Secret #2: He was aware of the Veil thinning.

He knew because there were suddenly more dead people flickering about, and he could see them despite personally being alive and de-Graced. Then there were the rumors.

One of Lucifer’s few sources of entertainment was rumor. And River Regional kept it in healthy supply. In the past few weeks, a number of birds and small creatures had been found mauled in the garden, thoroughly upsetting some of the other patients. The staff had dragged Lucifer away from his own investigation like a puppy looking to eat a dropped grape. Lucifer had forced himself into complacency. He’d done it when Crowley had trapped him and he could do it again, if it meant escaping this place.

The atmosphere had become tense when someone reported seeing a large black dog in the parking lot—possibly even a wolf.

And now there was the gunshot.

The rumor mill went off immediately. Patients were abuzz with the theory that someone had seen the dog and put it down, but no blood or body was to be found, and the action had happened out of the camera’s sights. Panic struck. The staff struggled to initiate lockdown and cope with the fresh flood of emotion.

Lucifer wasn’t an idiot. More ghosts? Black Dogs? Alive-again angels? Someone, somewhere, had effed up the Veil, and very possibly the Empty to boot.

Secret #3: Michael was waking up.

On rare occasion, Lucifer would catch a faint, humming rendition of _Cell Block Tango_ à la Chicago lilting down the hallway. Lucifer found that he instinctively recognized the voice, even if it came from a different vessel than the one he was accustomed to. All their time in the Cage together had also left Lucifer familiar with Michael’s surprising taste in musicals. Which was unfortunate because, despite being an angel, Michael did not have the voice of one, and was perpetually off-key. Although, he might have been doing that intentionally. Their fights had veered away from epic and towards petty before long.

Amidst the post-gunshot chaos, the glaze lifted from Michael’s eyes. Not entirely, but _enough_. Lucifer only caught a glimpse of it, as in the interest of getting all the patients away from the windows, Michael was wheeled from one room and Lucifer was escorted from another. For the three seconds it took them to pass each other, there was _awareness._

Secret #4: Lucifer’s stay at River Regional was nearing its end.

This final secret, Lucifer was especially careful to keep. Because he was a smart Devil. He could see Raphael’s manipulations from a mile away and knew there had to be some kind of imminent showdown. If he told Raphael he was being released, the younger would stalk him straight out the front door. Better to leave without a word. As much as Lucifer loved causing a stir, he lost his fondness for this particular game.

The gunshot had postponed things a bit, but now that the hype had settled and the flashing red-and-blues were gone, the plan was back in motion.

“Remember,” said the nurse as she handed him his clothes, “you have to check in and take your medication. Don’t want to end up back here again, right?”

Lucifer gave her his best, brightest smile, befitting of his title as the Light-Bringer. Then he lied. “Of course.”

He would have said anything to get out of there. His hands were already trembling with excitement. He craved freedom the way some of the other patients craved heroin, and this withdrawal had gone on too long. It was finally time to get his fix.

Lucifer took his clothes and prepared to leave River Regional.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, everyone. Thanks for waiting. Only two chapters left before this gets wrapped up.
> 
> I'm really trying to give everyone a fair shake here. But, man, honesty is painful, especially when you have to bash your favorite characters.


	19. Heat of the Moment

The Norse charms and curses ran fever-like through Gabriel’s body, and left him irate. He oscillated between wanting to hug his younger brothers and wanting to smack them upside the head. The hotel bar they’d chosen to meet at provided ample alcoholic temptation, and Gabriel barely stopped himself from starting the conversation with a drink in hand. After the Winchesters affirmed that Castiel would survive his injuries, Sam tried to subtly hint that he and Dean should let the angels have a little family conversation.

“You _are_ my family,” Castiel tried to argue.

“Always, Cas,” Dean said. “But…” His gaze roamed across the celestial menagerie assembled in the room. He clapped a hand on his best friend’s good shoulder, gentle enough to avoid further injury, yet firm enough to provide a reminder that Castiel’s broken arm was a result of recklessness. “We’re not your _only_ family.”

Castiel tried not to feel abandoned as they stepped around the corner. _Knowing_ a person acted to help you and _feeling_ that they were did not always go hand-in-hand.

Gabriel rubbed his hands over his face. “ _Oy vey_.” At least they were all breathing. Past that…Balthazar angrily refused to look him in the eye, Castiel’s own gaze was one of challenge, and Alfie could have passed for a kicked puppy.

“Well,” Balthazar said to Alfie, “looks like your adult supervision is here. I’ll take my leave, now.”

“Balthazar,” Gabriel said. “Hold up.”

“Is that an order?”

“Oh, come on. Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?” Balthazar barely kept himself from fuming. “Like you didn’t completely ignore my existence until dearest _Cassie_ and _Alfie_ were in danger? I suppose, now that they’re safe again, you don’t need me anymore.”

“That’s not how it is and you know it.”

“No,” Balthazar argued. “What I _know_ is that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. You’re just like Dad. You pick favorites and you manipulate people and you leave when you want; to hell with the rest of us.”

That was a punch to the gut. Gabriel could have doubled-over with the force of it. Sure, he was an asshole, but like _Dad?_ Being compared to Michael had been bad enough. He felt an unexpected rage sear his internal organs. “Correct me if I’m wrong, _B,_ but didn’t you, I don’t know, fake your death and take Heaven’s armory with you?”

“That was different,” Balthazar insisted. “I was…inconsequential. A foot soldier, and not even a very good one. You could _change_ things. But all you want to do is hide in the shadows, while your brothers and your sisters throw themselves onto grenades. Alfie has bloody PTSD and he’s doing more than you. Because why? You don’t want to grow a pair and _talk to your big brothers?_ ”

A wash of vindictiveness came over Gabriel, filling his head with every nasty thought there was, including but not limited to sarcastic remarks and the exact karmic backlash Balthazar would have faced had Gabriel still been the Trickster. It was acknowledgement of the virulence of these thoughts that instead prompted Gabriel to leave the bar without another word. Outside, he began to furiously strip away every scrap of Norse magic he donned. Removing the jagged wolf tooth around his neck alone restored some peace to his mind.

Holding it in his hand, the piece struck him with sickening remembrance of the Mark, burning into Lucifer’s essence, twisting jealous musings into bloodthirsty actions. Passing it off to Cain hadn’t changed Lucifer back.

Gabriel was not going to hurt the only family he had left.

The night had settled in and his skin had long since gone numb from the winter air by the time the door creaked open, and a tall trench-coated figure settled by him, shoulder-to-shoulder. Analytic eyes caught the curses and charms littered about. “I’m sorry,” Castiel said. “Those…do not look pleasant.”

“Yeah, well, I thought you were all gonna get yourselves killed. Didn’t have a lot of options.”

“I’m familiar with the feeling.” Castiel lowered his head. Cold silence dragged on, their breath puffing in the air. “I thought the same about coming here. I wanted to stop the fighting before it began. It seems like every bad choice I’ve ever made was in the name of peace.” His lungs ached. “I just want it to be over.”

And wasn’t that the kicker? All of them—Gabriel, Castiel, Alfie, Balthazar, Raphael, Michael, Lucifer—no matter how varied their approaches, wanted the same thing. For it to _be over_. For the dust to finally settle. For the blood to stop falling.

For peace, even if that peace was the kind you found in a graveyard.

###

The showdown in the River Regional parking lot didn’t negate the claims of big black dogs roaming the grounds, and Garth was nothing if not tenacious. He’d made a brief, tactical retreat after the gunfire to wait out any investigation that might happen, before re-approaching after dark. He was unsurprised to find Raphael lurking about, gun at the ready. Yet, Garth was comforted by the knowledge that he wasn’t going down without a silver bullet.

“Why are you here?” Raphael demanded.

“Well, there are still Black Dogs, aren’t there?” Garth held up his gun for emphasis. “Although now it’s gonna be kinda tricky getting near the place.”

Raphael narrowed his eyes. “That sounds like an accusation. You know who I am.”

“Yeah, but you’re still out here, hunting the same thing I’m hunting.” Garth stayed calm. He was, all in all, good at staying calm, unless Bess was involved. Archangel was a bit of a stretch for his fortitude, but he could roll with it. “Alfie’s fine, by the way. Nice kid.”

“That _kid_ is millennia older than you,” Raphael reminded him. “And I don’t need you spying on me on behalf of my brother. Who encouraged this? Gabriel?”

“Nope.” Garth stared straight ahead. “Look, man, I just don’t want anyone getting hurt, and this place reeks of Black Dogs.” That wasn’t an exaggeration. He scented wet fur and mild rot in the breeze. The wolf part of his brain insisted _foreign territory; danger._ Black Dogs were rare creatures, and so had always been considered solitary, but this was definitely the stink of an alpha protecting a pack. The gap in the Veil must have drawn them together.

Which also solved the mystery of why they’d moved from woodland creatures onto bigger targets. The alpha dogs were eliminating threats. Garth was sure that nothing screamed threat like _former angel._

Raphael was about to insist that Garth well and truly piss off when a pair of headlights bloomed in the parking lot entrance. Instinctively, both Raphael and Garth ducked down. The bright yellow of a cab rolled past them to the front of the building, though kept a distance of ten feet, as if afraid crazy was catching.

Lucifer strolled out the door.

“Of course,” Raphael intoned flatly. He wasn’t even surprised. Leave it to Lucifer. He stood suddenly from his hiding place, in the spotlight of the streetlamp, to ensure that Lucifer would see him—a brotherly way of saying “caught you red-handed.”

Lucifer’s eyes latched onto him. He offered practiced nonchalance. “Stalking is rude, Raphy, and the meter’s running.”

“Do I really matter so little to you?” Raphael called back across the lot, approaching in long strides.

“I could ask the same.” Lucifer dropped the act. “I see through you. Always have. Really, it was a laugh watching you try to manipulate me. The thing is: I’m not your chess piece anymore than I was Dad’s, and whatever squabble you’ve got going on, I don’t care.” Lucifer walked the last few feet to the cab. “I’m out.”

Raphael tried to stop him from climbing in. “I’m not using you. I want to fix things.”

“Then you should probably leave out the person who always breaks them.” Lucifer nudged Raphael out of the way. “Toodaloo, buckaroo.”

Lucifer slammed the door in Raphael’s face, then instructed the driver to get out of there as fast as humanly possible, which was still slower than he would have liked. Raphael was not going to give up that easily. He vaulted across the lot to his car, keys already in hand.

“You’re going after him?” Garth asked.

Raphael didn’t bother to respond. Rather, he revved the ignition and expertly reversed the car at high speed, hoping to tail the cab. He assumed correctly that Garth would stay behind to stand vigil at River Regional. Raphael wasn’t sure why he was bothering with Lucifer. The logical thing would have been to cut his losses and stick to watching Michael, who was neutrally regarded by the former Heavenly Host, as opposed to trying to reintegrate Lucifer’s toxic personality. But here he was: driving 50mph down a winding road, with the ridiculous notion that if he could get _Lucifer_ to play nice, then everything else would be a piece of cake.

Up ahead, he heard a squeal, followed by the grind of collapsing metal. He took the corner too fast and almost ended up becoming part of the wreckage. As it often was with shock, Raphael’s initial view was abstracted by emotion. Details came in tiny pieces. The golden glint of headlights on glass shards. A faint growl. The screaming darkness that had seeped into the cab’s dents. A louder, more insistent cry of pain. Raphael dove forward, gun at the ready.

“Stop it, you bastard mutt!” Lucifer shouted at the massive Black Dog attempting to haul him out of the wreckage with its teeth. “I am the Devil. You will listen to me.”

The dog was not impressed. If anything, it took the threats as a challenge. Raphael aimed the barrel at it, but couldn’t shoot without likely also hitting Lucifer. _Damn it._ He lowered the gun and grabbed the knife out of his boot, then went in for the kill.

The dog put up a valiant fight, finalized by a sharp whine for help. Raphael did not escape uninjured, but the pertinent fact was that he _did_ escape. Lucifer remained barely conscious as Raphael hauled his limp form into the car. The howl of more dogs sounded from a threatening proximity.

“That sounds like a _pack,_ ” Lucifer muttered blearily.

They’d have the get back to the hospital and barricade themselves in. It was their safest bet. If they waited here, Raphael had no doubt the other dogs would be on them in minutes. As a last-minute thought, Raphael grabbed the cab driver, whose pulse continued on. A rustling came from the trees.

“Go!” Lucifer shouted.

Raphael floored it. At the side of the road, masses of black fur emerged from the shadows. They’d barely have time to get inside, if any.

Raphael skid to a stop near the front door and all but threw his passengers inside. To Garth, who was running up, he declared, “They’re coming.”

At that very moment, probably because it was the worst possible moment, the fire alarm blared.

“ _Janet_ ,” Lucifer hissed.

“What?” Raphael asked.

“Janet the ghost. She starts fires.”

Of course. While the patients would be herded into a quadrant deemed safe, several members of the staff headed for the exit. This left the door _open_ when Raphael needed to bar it shut.

“No!” he shouted. “Keep the doors closed!”

Moments later, the PA system announced an animal warning—a large dog had barreled inside the building. “Michael,” Raphael realized. He grabbed a wheelchair close to the door, pushed Lucifer into it, and sprinted down the hall.

“What the hell?!” Lucifer demanded.

“The dog is going to go for Michael,” Raphael insisted, “and he’s unarmed, but his room should be a defendable position. Would you rather stay with Garth?”

And that was how Raphael found himself racing down the hallway of a mental institution, wheeling the blood-soaked and bruised Satan in front of him, with the sinking feeling that the Winchesters were about to make an appearance.

###

The call came in while Dean and Sam waited for the last vestiges of the celestial family discussion to die down. Castiel had come in moments ago, rubbing his hands from the cold, and brought them back into the hotel bar’s lounge area. Balthazar, for all his huffing and puffing, had not yet left, which may have had something to do with the puppy-dog eyes Alfie had pinned him with. Gabriel remained unusually quiet, though presented a façade of casualness by lounging in a plush chair, ankle over knee. Most of his Norse accessories had been stashed in his coat pockets.

Sam tried to sneak off to a corner where the tension wasn’t thick enough to drown a man before answering his phone. “What’s up, Garth?”

The other man answered in a rapid-fire ramble that boiled down to, “I think the Veil broke because there are ghosts _everywhere_ and these Black Dogs are hella territorial. Raphael said something about Michael and then disappeared with Lucifer, and that is a sentence I never thought I’d have to say.”

Dean let out an array of curses upon hearing the news, then relayed it to the inquisitive group as he and Sam headed toward the door. “Stay here,” he told them.

Alfie disagreed. “I’m going with you.”

“Whoa, no way,” Gabriel insisted, grabbing the back of Alfie’s shirt the way a cat might latch onto her kitten. “I don’t think so. They can handle it.”

“The whole hospital is in trouble,” Alfie replied, “and if someone doesn’t hold together the Veil, it’s only going to get worse.”

“Kiddo, you can’t hold the Veil together. You don’t have the juice.” Panic thrummed in Gabriel’s chest, outwardly disguised as condescension.

“I can try.” Alfie straightened his spine until he was standing at his maximum height, as if being taller than Gabriel also proved him entirely capable of handling this task. He kept his hands hidden so that no one would notice the way they trembled. A constant chant of _compromised, compromised, compromised_ rang through his head. “I’m done being useless. And we’re wasting time.”

Alfie closed his eyes. It had been six hours—enough time to build up a small amount of Grace, but if he flew there, he’d burn most of it. Really, he’d only have enough left to banish a ghost or two. Yet he knew, logically, that Gabriel was the only one out of all of them with even feasibly enough power to put a band-aid on the Veil, and that was if Alfie put him into a true adrenaline-and-Grace-fueled panic. It had seemed to be the common denominator between all of their stories: someone was in trouble, and only when an angel stepped in to help would their Grace pulse back to life. Gabriel had healed Alfie, Balthazar had shielded Raelyn, Alfie had kept Raphael from killing Castiel.

It was dangerous. It was stupid.

But if everyone was going to treat Alfie like a teenager, he had the right to act like one, and dangerous and stupid were practically required.

Alfie closed his eyes, repeated _I need to help_ in his head, like the most devout of prayers, until he believed it with every fiber of his being. Then, he flew.

“Damn it!” Gabriel screamed at the ceiling. He wanted to shout it eight more times, but restrained himself to the one. Alfie just had to go and be an idiot. Turning to Balthazar and Castiel, he ordered, “Stay. Put.”

He shuffled through his collection of totems until he found the one he was looking for—ancient-looking, warped metal that had once been a staple of his get-up. He’d used it when flying hadn’t been an option for fear of detection, back in the days before he’d really developed the workarounds that would let him fake being a Norse God, such as subtly bending space-time to simply appear somewhere else. Now, he used it because he would need to save as much of his true Grace as possible.

He disappeared faster than any magician.

Dean didn’t miss a beat. Pointing a finger at the two remaining angels, he announced, “What he said; and don’t kill each other,” before booking it toward the Impala.

###

To put it simply: River Regional was a minor apocalypse. Categorically, if such a thing could be whittled down to a series of pertinent details. Blood and war and, among the mess, all four archangels. Gabriel appeared in the foyer, empty due to its proximity to Black Dogs and gunshots. He didn’t immediately see Alfie, but he could feel the weak spot in the Veil like a gap between his teeth. He focused on finding its source. Though he held no illusions that he could fix it, Gabriel imagined it might have been possible to hold it closed just long enough to eliminate the worst of the threats.

He wondered briefly why Death hadn’t gotten off their lazy ass to help out yet. Surely, this was a crisis worthy of Death’s attention?

Unless Death had abandoned them. The cursed objects he carried filled him with bitterness at the idea. Betrayal. After all, Gabriel had liked Death—or, at least, the skeletal, morose version of Death who could share Gabriel’s appreciation of a good pastry. With the Winchesters still kicking around, Gabriel wouldn’t have been surprised if Death’s incarnation had changed over to the next Reaper in line. Or maybe they were in-between incarnations. Really, that would explain so much, and Gabriel would have preferred it over the idea that even Death had decided them to be a lost cause.

The building’s fluorescents shone alternatively blinding and dark. Some entire hallways were bathed in an inky blackness too deep to be natural. As Gabriel crossed through one such hallway, cold knifed through his shoulder and yanked him back.

Ghost.

Not even the flickering of a weak spirit, but something corporeal. If the Veil was well and truly leaking, there were probably ghosts from all over, far stronger than they should have been. It offered an acidic reminder of the dead rising during the first run of the apocalypse, shortly before he himself had been taken out of the picture.

Faced with little other choice, Gabriel held up a beaded bracelet on his arm, its charms an array of polished tiger’s-eye and dull marble. As he wielded it, the gold bled from one of the beads, turning it the same pale color as its marble compatriots. The ghost burst into a rain of amber glitter.

“Thank you, paranoia,” Gabriel sighed, “for convincing me it was a good idea to bank my own Grace.” It might have been what was going to get him out of here alive. As he neared the source, where he suspected Alfie had headed, he inventoried all of the trinkets he’d gathered up, angelic and pagan alike. Then inventoried them again. And again. He supposed it was an attempt to soothe himself, although it wasn’t having much effect.

Perhaps the reason it was so easy to find the breach was because it was swarming with corporeal and incorporeal spirits alike. Through a haze of half-formed ghosts, he could see shaky silhouettes. Room 212.

“Well, that looks like more fun than Chuck E. Cheese during flu season,” Gabriel remarked snidely. He sucked in a deep breath and then called out, “Alfie?!”

He only half-hoped for a response because he desperately did not want Alfie to be in that cloud of ick. The response he received was not from Alfie, but from an incredulous Raphael. Which was actually worse than no response. “Gabriel?”

“Well if it isn’t the Duke of Douchery,” Gabriel mocked. “Sorry, not who I’m looking for. Ta.”

“Your charge is a little tied up at the moment,” Raphael replied.

Anyone who looked at Gabriel then would have never guessed him to be the Trickster, but something far more vengeful. His voice oozed danger. “What did you do to him?”

“Nothing,” Raphael spat, as if the very thought was abominable. “He landed in the hallway, attempted to fight off the ghosts, and was overwhelmed. I had to drag him over the salt line before he got himself killed. You’re really not living up to your title as his legal guardian. You should be charged with child endangerment.”

“But he’s okay?”

“For now, but our defenses won’t hold out much longer, and the Veil grows weaker by the minute.”

 _Perfect._ In the sarcastic sense. Gabriel sighed and condemned himself to his fate. “I’m packing enough heat to _maybe_ put a band-aid on the gap in the Veil. Get me through.”

There was quiet for a moment, and then a shower of rock salt. Gabriel took his chance and barreled in, nearly taking a tumble over a heap of dead Black Dog. True to Raphael’s word, Alfie slumped against the back of a visitor’s chair. The pallor of his skin suggested he was halfway into a coma, and Gabriel had to check to ensure he was breathing. Yep. Slow, shallow breaths. Satisfied, Gabriel’s tunnel vision widened at last to include the rest of the room.

Apparently, Raphael’s “we” and “our” had encompassed more than himself and Alfie.

“Aw hell no,” Gabriel griped. “Not you jackasses, too.”

On the opposite side, Michael and Lucifer were each propped up in twin wheelchairs; Michael barely blinked at his arrival, and the general impression coming from Lucifer was _high as hell_. Gabriel would have analyzed them more if it hadn’t been for the writhing miasma in the middle of the room, which he pinpointed as the hole in the Veil.

“Welcome to the party,” Raphael said.

“It’s a regular family reunion,” Lucifer added. “So glad you could make it, little bro. I’m sure Mikey is too, but he’s still trying to figure out if this is the real life or if it’s just fantasy.” He snapped his fingers in front of Michael’s face for emphasis.

“That’s it?” Gabriel asked. “You _stabbed me_ and I don’t even get an apology?”

“You tried to stab me first, dumbass.” Lucifer raised an eyebrow, which was about the only gesture he could make without pain lancing through his body.

“I suggest you two find a better time for this,” Raphael interrupted. His gaze remained locked on the hoard of dead things trying to break across the room’s threshold. “Gabriel, can you repair the Veil or not?”

“Probably not,” Gabriel replied, sizing up the breach. There was no way he’d be able to get Alfie out of there the way things stood right now. He ran his fingers along every single charm that held his stored Grace, and called upon any Norse magic he thought could help. “But I can try. Just to be clear, though, this doesn’t mean I forgive _any_ of you.” He stepped closer to the threat of imminent death. Goosebumps raced over his skin. “And by the way? Your party sucks.”

With that proclamation, he threw his hands forward into the breach. His skin went hypothermic. It cracked. It bled. Still, he could trace the edges of the Veil in his mind and he tried to pull them toward each other. Only Death or God would be truly able to stitch this wound shut, and neither of them seemed to be showing up any time soon.

Gabriel was shaking by the time the Veil’s bleeding slowed down by half. He, alone, would not be enough. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw dread fill the room as the salt line whittled away. Raphael knew he was woefully unequipped to deal with the ensuing flood.

They were all going to die.

It struck Gabriel and Raphael simultaneously that, for better or worse, the people in this room were their _brothers_ , and if they did not act at that very moment, they would be brutally murdered.

The panic poured liquid fire into their veins.

Grace. _A lot_ of Grace.

The power Raphael had always taken for granted rushed to his aid and sent the front line of ghosts scattering into golden sparks, aimed for Heaven or otherwise. Behind him, Gabriel poured every ounce of his restored energy into closing the gap. One quarter left. One eighth. But Raphael could tell from a glance that Gabriel alone wouldn’t be enough to finish the job.

“Give me the rock salt,” Lucifer said in a tone that brokered no argument. Once upon a time, he’d unleashed it on unruly fledglings. Now, it was sharper. Less fond. Lucifer raised an eyebrow and, for a second, Raphael could almost pretend the Fall was a bad dream. Lucifer took his hesitation as distrust. “I’ve got Casper and friends. We’re not getting out of here unless you help Gabriel.”

Raphael handed over the gun and wheeled Lucifer to face the ghosts. His injuries made aiming difficult, but the sawed-off had a wide spray. He spent a half-second wondering if he’d really just put a gun in the Devil’s grip before turning to face the gap in the Veil. Gabriel was wearing down. There were no alternatives.

Raphael plunged his hands into the remainder of the gap and gave it everything he had left.

The cold affront ached in his very bones. He felt Gabriel stagger, but not relent, and so pushed himself impossibly harder. This, he thought, was what he was made for. For once, it came down to a simple do-or-don’t, rather than the complex machinations of orchestrating Heaven and all its residents. Like the old days. The very old days.

With the added celestial wattage, the hole in the Veil shriveled. It wasn’t healed, but it had returned to being _thin_ rather than being _open._ Hopefully, that would hold until they figured out where Death had popped off to.

Black swarmed over Gabriel’s vision. He felt the distinct need to vomit. Every instinct he had screamed at him to run out of there, but he didn’t have the strength to lug Alfie out with him. The kid was ever-so-slightly heavier than your average sack of potatoes, and wouldn’t deal well with being carried as such. So, reluctantly, Gabriel collapsed by his charge’s side and resolved to keep an eye on the other three.

“It…worked,” Raphael breathed in astonishment.

There was a sharp bang as Lucifer blasted away a few spectral stragglers. “Woo, go team.”

Gabriel glanced at Raphael. “…Did you give Satan a shotgun?”

“Desperate times,” Raphael said in defense. He probably should have remedied that, but it was keeping Lucifer preoccupied, and he had to go check on Michael. To his astonishment, Michael’s head was turned toward Lucifer, eyes squinting in uncharacteristic focus, as if trying to peer through frosted glass and make sense of the shadows on the other side.

“Michael?” Raphael hedged. Michael did not break his focus from Lucifer. If anything, it got more intense. Raphael knew that expression. Threat assessment.

“Actual holy crap,” Gabriel said. “Is he waking up?”

Almost in response, Michael threw himself from the wheelchair and at Lucifer, immediately trying to wrestle the gun from the Devil’s grip. Lucifer shouted as his own chair toppled sideways. Colliding with the hard tile didn’t do any favors for the bones he was positive had been broken in the car crash. In fact, Lucifer could have sworn he heard something crack. His arm was wrenched behind his back. He lost any hold he had on the shotgun. It skittered across the floor.

“Cool it!” Lucifer yelled, hoping some of it might make it through Michael’s thick skull. “I wasn’t going to shoot anyone, you dumbbell! Get the hell off!”

There was some shuffling, and then Lucifer felt Michael’s weight lift. Though Michael kicked, Raphael found that his brother’s legs were weak. Getting to Lucifer had been mostly a matter of momentum. Raphael deposited Michael on the other side of the room, on the floor next to Gabriel, and was satisfied when Michael struggled to get up from this lower position.

“Watch him,” Raphael told Gabriel, then went to go flip Lucifer over so that his face wasn’t smooshed into the floor.

“You’re not the boss of me,” Gabriel retorted, but nonetheless pushed Michael back down when he seemed to be making progress getting to his feet.

Michael straight-up growled at him, rasping what Gabriel found to be a very odd statement: “You’re not real.” Conviction was etched into his face.

“Oh, did I forget to mention?” Lucifer coughed as Raphael helped him lay flat on the floor. “He’s totally bonkers. Convinced we’re still in Hell.”

“You’re kidding me,” Gabriel said.

“The Cage cracked him. I barely even helped.”

Raphael glared down at Lucifer. “Somehow, I don’t entirely believe that.”

“I’m serious,” Lucifer said. “Sure, I messed with him for a few centuries, but it was mutual. Eventually, he just got stuck inside his own head. Didn’t even notice when I left.”

Gabriel clenched his jaw. It sounded a lot like certain pocket universes Gabriel had created in the past—places just outside of reality, but _easier._ Coming back was always the worst. A crash after a high. Gabriel knew what he had to say to get them through this. Steadfast, he grabbed both his oldest brother’s arm and attention. “Michael.” The once-viceroy of Heaven stiffened and started a new threat assessment. Anyone would take that as a sign to treat carefully. Anyone but Gabriel. The youngest of the four met his brother’s glare with equal fervor as he demanded, “So what?”

Michael tried to violently remove himself from Gabriel’s grasp.

Gabriel held fast as he launched into fervor. “So what if this is a dream or if this is real? If it’s real, you’re gonna have to deal with it at some point. And if it’s not, well, why bother waking up back in the Cage? Why not stay awhile? Not like you don’t have time to kill.”

Michael did not pause his struggle as he responded, “Because it feels real. More real than any dream I’ve had. I imagine that must be Lucifer’s doing.” A sharp kick. “But if I forget that it _isn’t_ real, I may not ever be able to return.”

Raphael mentally surmised that Michael being Graceless had something to do with his inability to distinguish between the two states. An archangel could rarely be tricked by illusion, even one cast by another archangel.

“Fine, then.” Gabriel took a sharpie out of his pocket—stashed there in case he needed to refresh his Norse spells—clutched Michael’s arm, and wrote in Enochian, _You will wake up._ “There,” said Gabriel. “You won’t forget. Now do me a favor and stop kneeing me in the ribs.”

Michael stared at his arm for a moment, then at the intricate spellwork inscribed onto Gabriel’s own skin. He wasn’t familiar with the patterns, and that filled him with doubt. Usually, the best way to break himself from one of these visions was to thoroughly examine the unfamiliar or nonsensical. But he was examining, and the dream was not tearing at the seams, and it didn’t _feel_ like Lucifer’s handiwork.

Michael took a deep breath. A breath he shouldn’t have needed. Exhaustion made his every bone ache. Father above, this _was_ a strange vision. He clung to the print on his arm, which promised, _You will wake up._ If this was a dream, perhaps he just needed to make it to the end. Fine. He’d play ball for now.

He stopped kicking Gabriel.

“ _Thank you,_ ” Gabriel said.

Five feet away, Raphael had thrown a pillow under Lucifer’s head, convinced the Devil to stay still unless he wanted to aggravate his fractured clavicle, and reloaded the shotgun with rock salt in the event that they received any more otherworldly visitors. Sweat darkened his shirt. Blood darkened the leg of his jeans. Mortality darkened his expression. As he stood guard, he gazed upon the room’s occupants.

For the first time in millennia, all four archangels were in the same room.

They were so screwed, thought Gabriel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ended up being a much longer and more difficult chapter than I anticipated, but also probably one of the most important. Next chapter will wrap everything up. I'm a little sad to see this story go, but mostly relieved. It's been one of my toughest projects yet and it will be nice to see it done. Like a trophy on a shelf, except less gold, more wordy, and under a pen-name.


	20. Four Angels Walk Into a Bakery

Gabriel knew his family was crazy, but having the Big Four all stuck in the same room in a mental facility was taking things too far. To top it off, they were inebriated by fatigue and, in Lucifer’s case, whatever sedative Raphael had pumped him full of to put him out of his misery. His shoulder hitched at a sharp angle that resembled malformed origami. In a sarcastic slur, he commented, “Well, this is fun.”

Raphael aimed a sour glance his way. “You’re not helping the situation.”

“He rarely does,” Michael added, though he wasn’t fully committed to starting another round of roughhousing. It was more of a reflex.

“Would you all just _shut up?”_ Gabriel snapped. “I am so sick of listening to you fight all the time. None of us want to be here. We get it. No need to start another apocalypse over it.”

Lucifer scoffed, rolling his eyes so hard he made himself dizzy in the process. Michael was more quiet in his surrender. The haze began to settle back in over his features. He could hear them and understand them, but they lacked relevance. Raphael was the only one to offer a vocalized response—and what an unanticipated response it was.

“I agree with Gabriel,” he said. Simply. As if he _hadn’t_ waged two wars himself.

“Hold on,” Gabriel countered, tempted to clean out his ears to ensure he heard correctly. “What now?”

Raphael gestured to them as a mismatched, patchwork whole. “Us. This endless feud. It has to stop.”

Lucifer, torn between laughing and snarling, settled on a toneless “Not exactly our specialty, champ.”

“And look where that led us,” Raphael replied. “I counted how many angels had been reborn. There must be hardly an angel left in Heaven. Our kind has made itself all but extinct. The battles have been endless.”

“The four of us making daisy chains and singing Kumbaya isn’t going to change that,” Lucifer said, teetering on the vitriolic side. “They’re too human, and I told you from the start how _that_ little experiment was going to work out. I was _locked up_ for those words. I know a losing battle when I see one.”

Raphael could not be swayed so easily. “They need guidance.”

“From us?” Gabriel bit back. “You _brainwashed_ them the first time around. We’re not leaders. Screw whatever Dad said.”

Michael’s brow furrowed deep enough to darken the hollows around his eyes. “Gabriel,” he said in a voice that once would have boomed—thunderous—throughout the Heavens, “talking about our father like that is not a wise choice.”

“Pfft. You know what wasn’t a wise choice?” Gabriel let out a strangled laugh. Slapped a knee. Distorted his face into a hostile grin. “Sending one of his kids to Hell for disobedience, treating us like trained monkeys _,_ and then expecting us to make decisions for all of Heaven. That’s like threatening to fire your intern one week, then promoting them to CEO the next. And _oh boy_ , did we take the whole company down with us.”

Truth—raw truth—had a tendency to bring about one of two outcomes: absolute silence or absolute uproar. This was the former.

Raphael guarded the hallway pensively. Meanwhile, Michael surrendered another inch to the allure of oblivion. This was another reality he couldn’t face—a new Hell. All its demons wore his brothers’ faces, took their names, used their words. He would have slipped away completely had Raphael said, quietly, “We could do better this time.”

“What _we_?” Lucifer asked. The question was more somber than biting. “The Devil, Sandman over there, a fake Norse god, and Mr. Fix-It? Because that’s what _we_ are.”

“ _We_ are brothers,” Raphael said. “Above all else. This is a second chance.”

“You’re such a hypocrite,” Gabriel rebuked. “Oh, sure, you have on your white hat now, but the second the rest of our family is involved, you trade out for your green beret. Newsflash, bro—no one except you three want another war. Most of us didn’t want the first one!”

“None of us ever _wanted_ war,” Michael defended, emotion peeking through the haze, “but it was our father’s plan.”

Lucifer practically hissed. “Dad didn’t even care _._ I know. I talked to him. He just got so tired of cleaning up everyone’s messes. You had choices.”

“So did you,” Gabriel reminded Lucifer. “You could have both just _walked away_.”

“They almost did,” Raphael said. He paused to sort through the event in his head, now wondering if there was a part of it that had slipped his notice before—a line that ran between his three brothers. A thick, bloody line. “All of Heaven was watching,” he continued, stretching out the spaces between the words. “Lucifer asked Michael to. Michael considered it for some time before ultimately deciding against it.”

Gabriel might as well have been punched in the gut. “So I ask,” he replied, turning hardened eyes on Lucifer, “and you stab me, but then you turn around and ask Michael for the same thing? Ouch.”

Acid boiled in Lucifer’s stomach. His temper threatened to break loose; to shred apart everything and everyone it could reach. His voice growled with the strain of reining it in. “You were _distracting_ me so that you could put a _knife_ in my back. You didn’t mean what you said, but I did.” Lucifer would have given up the apocalypse in a second if they had offered their kinship. It was a truth that made him ill. To think that he, the Devil, had been that desperate for something so trivial and sentimental. “Go screw yourself, Gabriel.”

“Brothers, please,” Raphael said. “Is this how you want it to be for the rest of eternity?”

“Don’t give me that bull,” Gabriel spat. “You literally tried to put a bullet in Castiel’s head this morning. Are you really going to tell me he’s _more_ dangerous than Lucifer?”

“Castiel has killed far more angels than Lucifer has,” Raphael argued. “He is the _reason_ our kind is going extinct. I am acting for the greater good.”

“So was Naomi. Metatron. Castiel.” Gabriel glared. “ _The greater good_ isn’t always _good_ , Raphael.”

Michael offered a soft, “No. It’s not.” The sound itself was so sincere that it attracted everyone’s attention. In contrast, Michael continued to stare at the words on his arm. _You will wake up._ The idea that this was all a dream made it easier to speak. “That’s how this all started. And now look at us. We are fighting about how we never wanted to fight.”

“You’re one to talk,” Lucifer said.

“I know.” Michael stared back determinedly, an action which wholly threw Lucifer off guard in its sincerity. “I…failed. Completely. And all of you paid the price.”

Michael realized then that Hell had done to him what Hell always does—punish the guilty. He wasn’t without his sins. Tumbling through dream-world after dream-world, he’d finally considered the possibility that there had been other ways. He wondered, persistently, if he should have taken the Mark instead. If he shouldn’t have used Naomi to wipe out Heaven’s memory of Lucifer having been _good_ in fear of an uprising. If he’d gone too far when he insisted on a similar treatment after Gabriel had disappeared. Heaven had been breaking for a long time, and he’d fractured it more by forcing it into its traditional shape rather than letting it change. He’d wanted to do right by their father.

He was beginning to get the feeling that their father would have been very disappointed.

 _You will wake up,_ the words on his arms promised, neater than Michael had ever remembered Gabriel’s handwriting being. For a blood-curdling second, Michael wasn’t sure which was more frightening—that he was dreaming or that he wasn’t.

Lucifer let out an aggressive snort. “Boo-hoo,” he said. “Daddy’s boy Michael isn’t so perfect after all. Join the club.”

“I think what Lucifer is _trying to say,_ ” Raphael interjected, “is that we have all failed in some way. Even our Father found this task too daunting.” Raphael had the autobiography to prove it.

Gabriel’s eyebrows shot up his forehead in challenge. “If we all suck, then why are you trying to get back in charge of Heaven?”

“Because it’s _home_ ,” Raphael said, “and it’s broken, and no one else is trying to fix it.”

“Hate to tell you, kiddo,” said Lucifer, “but there’s no putting it back together the way it was. Yeah, the others may hate me, but _hoo boy_ , they’re not so fond of all you either. Now that Dad’s flown the coop, and they know it, it’s all just politics.” His grin was barbed wire and old scars. “Should I tell you how many politicians I’ve seen go to Hell?”

“ _That’s_ what’s broken,” Gabriel contributed. “We used to be a family, not a government. You want peace? You work on that first.”

“Then let’s work on it,” Raphael implored. He spread his arms halfway, as if offering a hesitant hug to their band of misguided misfits. “We started the war. We have to be the ones to start the peace.”

“Like family therapy?” Lucifer mocked. “Sunday dinners? I mean, you can’t be serious—”

“Okay.” The agreement was quick and fast, slicing through Lucifer’s statement. And, most surprisingly, it came from Michael’s corner. Clarity flickered across his features. “I’m willing to try if you are.”

Gabriel choked on air. “For reals?” he coughed, surveying the room in something beyond disbelief; perhaps more afraid than disbelief usually was. “We’re all going to sit. Together. And talk civilly?”

“That’s the plan,” Raphael said. He narrowed his eyes, mildly confused at why Gabriel had sounded so protesting. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Well, yeah, but…” But it had never worked before. But what Gabriel had wanted had never mattered. Speech usually didn’t fail Gabriel, and now he gaped like a fish, trying to string together a coherent, succinct sentence that would explain the million reasons he’d trailed off at “but.”

Lucifer groaned exaggeratedly, as if greatly pained. “Alright. Fine,” he snapped, throwing an uninjured arm into the air. He was as unconvinced as Gabriel, however was outnumbered, outgunned, and knew when it was time to human an adversary. Agreeing had fewer consequences than disagreeing at the moment. He forced a smile. The corners of his eyes were too smooth for the expression to be genuine. “Let’s get the band back together.”

They had all agreed.

It should have been exciting. It was, in fact, terrifying beyond all reason.

###

The remainder of the night’s events occurred as follows:

Sam and Dean arrived at River Regional, greeted enthusiastically by hoards of Black Dogs, their fur bristling as they clawed at the barricaded doors. It took most of an hour and the Impala’s trunk/armory to cut through them. They were the opposite of Moses—instead of parting a red sea, they left one flowing in their wake. As the final wretched howl dithered, Sam fired off a flare gun. It was a pre-arranged all-clear sign. Garth came to meet them promptly.

“Hey, guys,” he said. Despite being a tall man, Garth always gave the impression that he was smaller, and his hunched shoulders emphasized this all the more. The skin on his face stretched thin from the effort of a weary smile.

“You good?” Dean replied. “No…?” He gnashed his teeth in a parody of a werewolf.

“All good,” Garth assured. “The staff and patients are spooked, but no one’s hurt. They’re looking for gas leaks. Easier than believing in ghosts, you know?”

They knew all too well. Sam glanced at the door briefly before asking, “What happened?”

An unmistakable voice replied from the right: “The Veil tore open like a size two dress on a size ten lady, that’s what.”

Gabriel. He and Alfie sat in a corner of the waiting area, each a little slouched over in their respective chairs. With a heavy puff of air, Gabriel managed to shove himself to his feet. “Tell you on the way,” he said. “We need to vamoose.”

“What?” Sam wondered reflexively. “Why? Garth said he saw Raphael and Lucifer here. That’s…a little concerning.”

“ _A little_?” Dean scoffed.

“The big bros aren’t gonna pull anything,” Gabriel explained. He rubbed at his eyes, as exhausted as he would have been if it were four in the morning and he’d run a marathon, despite it being seven in the evening and not a finish line in sight. “They’re probably on their way to the hospital already. Besides, we’ve…called a truce.” The phrase was both accurate and not. _Truce._ It was so much more fragile than that; the finest of fine china, placed in clumsy hands.

Sam sensed the disquiet. “Gabriel—”

“Look, it’s fine,” Gabriel interrupted with force and not at all like it was, indeed, _fine_. “It’s all fine and I will tell you all about how fine it is _in the car._ ”

Behind him, Alfie nodded to clarify that their situation was truthfully some semblance of okay. Sam turned to Dean, who nodded in return. They were all exhausted. It wasn’t the time to start a fight if they didn’t have to. In any case, Cas was still at the hotel bar with Balthazar, and that combination was bound to end poorly if left unattended for too long.

They walked outside into the cold swell of shadow, now free of Black Dogs. The faint rumble of another car faded from earshot. Raphael and Lucifer, Gabriel supposed. He should have been…something. Relieved? Anxious? The exhaustion muted it all. Dean was walking too close to him, and Sam too close to Alfie, and he wanted to laugh—to fall into absolute, unrelenting _hysterics._ A terrible little giggle managed to escape. Dean walked closer.

Gabriel no sooner sat down than passed out.

###

Among the list of things Castiel had not expected to happen tonight, finding himself inebriated was high up. Sitting across from an equally inebriated Balthazar was even higher. It had started when Balthazar grabbed a drink to calm down. However, the contents of one glass had not been calming enough, and so one turned into three. Castiel hadn’t intended to drink, but the ibuprofen wasn’t doing much for his broken arm, and whisky was the Winchester equivalent of high-grade painkillers. They soon found themselves in the corner seat of the hotel café, the place closed and quiet for the night.

“You’re more silent and brooding than usual,” Balthazar muttered.

“You’re drunker than usual,” Castiel replied.

“Not by much.”

That assessment was frankly concerning. Castiel tried to redirect the conversation. “Why are you talking to me?” he wondered. “You said you were going to ignore my existence.”

Balthazar shrugged lazily. “That was before the shots.” He closed his eyes and took a breath, as if he could absorb the supernatural serenity than came with cafés after closing time. The only light was a dim incandescent glow coming from the hallway. There were no people, aside from the faint voices drifting in from the lobby, indecipherable with distance. The alcohol draped a comfortable haze over his rattled nerves. He let his breath back out. “You’re worried about your Winchesters.”

“Yes,” Castiel confirmed, far too resolute for the amount of alcohol he had imbibed.

“Always are,” Balthazar mumbled.

“I’m also worried about Alfie and Gabriel,” Castiel continued. “Aren’t you?”

Balthazar sat-up halfway to send Castiel a disparaging glance. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“I suppose you are.”

They both settled down again, sprawled in the booth seats on either side of the table, and remained so until interrupted.

“Well, this is weird,” Dean’s voice rang. He appeared holding a tray of coffee, followed by the rest of their makeshift team. Gabriel hovered on the edge of coherence, already halfway through a large Styrofoam cup, while Alfie gave the impression that he’d forgotten all of his surroundings outside of caffeine. Sam, less distracted, raised an eyebrow as they approached the table.

“Are you _drunk_?” he asked them both.

“No,” Balthazar lied.

Castiel’s face pinched, halfway between contrition and confusion. “I might be slightly inebriated.”

“Eh,” Dean said, squeezing into the booth next to him, “I’ll take it so long as you’re not going _Hunger Games_ on each other.”

Sam grabbed a chair from another table in acknowledgement that trying to fit his 6’4 frame in beside Dean would painfully sandwich Castiel against the wall. In contrast, Gabriel, Alfie, and Balthazar fit neatly—if a little snugly—on the other side. Alfie, in spite of being the tallest, got trapped in the middle, acting as a barrier.

“What happened?” Castiel wondered.

“Yeah,” Dean agreed, “still waiting to hear about that myself.”

When Gabriel didn’t start speaking, Alfie sighed and responded, “The Veil tore. When it did, a veritable army of ghosts got loose, and all the Black Dogs came sniffing.”

“It was the paranormal Alamo,” Gabriel piped up, chin resting in his palm, as if the conversation bored him. It did not, but everyone thinking it did was of the upmost importance.

Dean reacted skeptically. “You guys had enough mojo to close it?”

“Not exactly.” Alfie side-eyed Gabriel. “I used up all my Grace. The last thing I remember is hearing Raphael.”

Balthazar became three shades more sober at this part of the story, leaning out across the table to examine their expressions. “And?”

“Raph hauled his skinny ass over the salt line before he got filleted by any phantoms-of-the-operating room,” Gabriel reported. His chest ached with the effort of restraining a scream. The walls of the café seemed closer than when they’d sat down. “I Rambo-ed in a few minutes later and, bam! Family reunion. The big four, together again.”

“You said you made a truce?” Sam prompted.

“It was work together or die together,” Gabriel said. “Go figure, no one chose die. Then, after the Veil was patched up, we talked. Well, we _yelled._ A lot. A few bones were broken. And I’m not saying we’re cool now, because we definitely aren’t, but…let’s just say we have an understanding.”

“So Cas is safe?” Dean asked.

“I got Raphael to back down,” Gabriel confirmed. “He also threw in a map of places Cassie-boy might want to avoid. A lot of reborn angels still aren’t happy with him, and Raph isn’t going to stop someone else that wants to take him out.”

Dean looked like he was about to throw a fit, but Castiel put a hand on his arm to calm him. “These are acceptable terms,” Castiel said. “I trust you, Gabriel.”

Sam was quick to inquire, “What about Michael and Lucifer?”

“Lucifer’s bargain is that we don’t put him back in the Cage so long as he doesn’t hurt anyone and stays far, far away from anyone with the last name Winchester.” Gabriel looked at Sam, Dean, and Castiel pointedly. He lingered on Castiel, reminding him that Winchester was legally _his_ last name as well. “One of the Black Dogs used Luci as a chew toy, so it’s in his best interest to play along.”

Sam clenched his hand under the table in order to remain a rational adult topside. The scar on his palm, old and faded, ached new again. “That’s not really fair, is it? He’s getting off easy.”

“It’s not about fair,” Gabriel said, fingernails denting the Styrofoam cup. “It’s about keeping the peace.” He promised himself that, later, he’d talk more with Sam about that, because he was going to need the Winchesters to trust him. They wouldn’t if they thought he was going to let his brothers get away with anything and everything just to avoid another fight. This wasn’t the time for feelings, though—it was time for the brass tacks.

Hastily, before anyone could argue about their compromise, Gabriel added, “Michael’s got the same deal as Lucifer, but he’s _pre~tty_ out of it. Thinks he’s still in Hell and this is all one big hallucination. Not much to sweat about there. Besides, I think the idea of being Heaven’s babysitter again terrifies him.” Gabriel smiled thinly as if it was a bad joke. It was better, he thought, than addressing the laundry list of other details, including Michael’s varying ability to talk amongst the big four, let alone anyone else. Still smiling, Gabriel gave a parodic hat-tip and concluded, in his best Porky Pig voice, “Th-th-that’s all, folks.”

“No, it’s not,” Balthazar retorted. The tenor of his voice sagged with mild alarm. “You didn’t say what they asked you to do.”

Balthazar always had been clever. Gabriel’s smiled waned. “Oh, you know,” he said. “About what you’re expect. They want me to go back to Heaven.”

The collective response consisted of variations between surprise and profanity.

Gabriel pushed his empty cup aside, one side practically torn to shreds. “Just to keep tabs,” he elaborated. “Eventually, the halos up there are gonna cotton on to all of us down here, and it ain’t gonna be pretty, especially if the ones down here start getting some mojo back. Seeing as I’m the only archangel who _hasn’t_ tried to take over Heaven, I was voluntold to negotiate.”

Alfie stared at his hands, not having heard this part of the deal yet and feeling decidedly guilty for backing Gabriel into that corner. Castiel’s shoulders slumped in sympathy. “You _are_ the least likely to start another war,” he consoled.

“Yeah, yeah,” Gabriel muttered. He pointed at the three Winchesters. “Just don’t get any ideas. I’m not your celestial callboy.”

“Of course,” Castiel agreed. It was partially a lie. If the straits were dire enough, Gabriel’s name was going to stay on speed dial. However, he promised himself he would try his best to refrain from making that call if it involved heavenly feuds.

Balthazar imagined this was the deal Gabriel deserved. For his crime of abandonment, he would henceforth be at the forefront of family commitment. It was an irony that Gabriel would have appreciated if it had happened to anyone but him, which Balthazar would remind him of. Tomorrow. For now, some of Balthazar’s anger ebbed away. Leaning heavily on his elbows, he said, “If that’s the whole of it, I’m going home.”

“Not like that, you’re not,” Gabriel reprimanded. “You’re drunk.”

“I’m an _angel_.”

“A drunk angel.”

In protest, Balthazar shuffled through his pockets for his keys. Their absence was exaggerated by a light jingle to his left. He looked up to see Alfie handing them over the Gabriel.

Balthazar glared. “I was going to forgive you, but now I’m not.”

“I’m hurt.” Gabriel twirled the keys. “Either you’re getting a room or I’m driving.”

“Then you’re driving.”

Gabriel blinked hard because that had almost— _almost_ —sounded like absolution. “Alright. Fine.”

Against his will, he started to grin. Widely. Sincerely. They were all finally going home.

###

It took a solid month for things to settle down. Most of the angels had cleared out of the Brookings area, which was good for Gabriel, Alfie, and Balthazar, but less-so for Tabula Rasa. The establishment had been booming with ex-celestial passerby. Several awarded generous online reviews, leading to a bump in business even after they departed.

In other news, Alfie finally hit the big one-eight. Gabriel’s suggestion of a strip-club celebration was quickly turned down by the birthday boy, as expected. Balthazar contributed the winning idea of taking a road trip up to Canada for a drink, since their northern neighbors had the good sense to set the legal drinking age at eighteen. It was a seven-hour drive with a halfway stop in Fargo, where Gabriel crammed in as many references as he could. Whenever Balthazar threw insults at Gabriel, Gabriel would adopt an exaggerated Minnesota accent and reply, “I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou.”

At five hours in, Alfie wondered if taking angel-express wouldn’t have been better, even knowing that he might have dropped out of the sky a hundred miles in.

Coming home to discover Castiel, Sam, and Dean had settled on sending a nice birthday card had been a relief. Also, he won $2 off the included scratch cards.

Most days, it seemed like a happy ending. Others, the cost of that happiness came due; whenever Gabriel compensated for distress with hyperactivity, or Balthazar with distance, or occasionally Alfie with a long lunch break away from Peace-a-Pizza. Tonight, the air in Tabula Rasa buzzed—less with caffeine and more with anxiety.

Gabriel tried to be the cool kid at the lunch table at all times. He was the master of arrogant eyebrow-raises and disingenuous smirks, fluent in innuendo, always carried a trick up his sleeve. That he kept tugging at the hem of his button-up put Balthazar in a state of unease.

“Why did I let you talk me into this?” Gabriel asked as Raelyn turned the front door sign around to _Closed_.

“Into hosting a family meeting here after hours?” Raelyn responded. She ticked off her fingers as she offered reasons. “Because it’s private, it’s warded, and you don’t want them in your apartment.”

In the last month, Raelyn had learned that counseling angels was a sink or swim job, and while she floundered at times, her backstroke was gradually improving. Most of the time, it came down to a matter of repeating their own words back to them.

The first morning Gabriel had appeared back at the bakery, he’d expected a barrage of questions from his boss rather than a muted “So. Angels?” It had taken a week and a few casual displays of celestial tom-foolery before she was remotely comfortable with the idea that she had two immensely powerful beings on the payroll. Yesterday, she’d rolled her eyes as Gabriel and Balthazar’s nametags changed with a snap of fingers.

“Can you believe this man used to be fourth in line to inherit the throne of Heaven?” Balthazar had mocked as he examined the neat cursive spelling out _Trainspotting Reject._

“No,” Raelyn had answered truthfully.

She had been the one to suggest Tabula Rasa as a good meeting place. It closed at seven and was common ground between Gabriel and Raphael—the only two out of the four brandishing Grace. At the time, Gabriel had agreed. He was less sure now.

This would be their first meeting with full attendance. Two weeks ago, Gabriel had reluctantly gone to visit Michael. Although he was awake more often than not these days, he maintained suspicion that he was in Hell. The words on his arm had been traced over and over again in various colors. He’d remained reserved for much of the visit.

Raphael texted him periodically—checking that Gabriel hadn’t gone off the radar again, Gabriel assumed. The first time he _called_ was a few days ago to announce that Michael’s release was immanent and it was time for them to have an Official Family Gathering.

It was a good thing that Gabriel had Grace again because he’d been stress-baking since that moment and, frankly, eating most of the end product.

He pulled at the hem of his shirt once more.

“You said they don’t want to fight,” Raelyn assured.

Balthazar put a firm hand on his shoulder. “If you need backup, Alfie and I are a phone call away,” he reminded. “Alfie may arrive covered in pizza, but a phone call away nonetheless.”

“Right,” Gabriel said. “It’ll be fine.” He looked at the front door. “As long as no one gives Satan espresso.”

Not ten minutes after Balthazar and Raelyn left, headlights flashed outside the window and the rumble of a car died. Hot panic burst inside Gabriel’s chest like a blown fuse. Last chance. He forced himself to keep his wings still. To stay cool. To act like he didn’t care.

The door jingled.

Raphael emerged first, holding it open for their two brothers. Lucifer, fortified by a sling and a walking cast, managed to keep his posture rigid in an effort to hold his pride intact.

Michael followed at a measured pace. While the walking was an improvement, he remained haunted. His gaze stayed fixed, uncaring of his surroundings, as if he was little more than a passenger.

Lucifer was a more curious creature. He thoroughly examined every inch of the place he could see, then cast swift judgment: “You always liked _quaint._ ” The jab was amicable enough to be considered non-threatening.

“Quaint and not on fire,” Gabriel clarified. “Let’s keep it that way.”

Raphael’s expression screamed, _Please, for the love of Dad._ Babysitting duty must have been a pain in the ass. Lucifer and Michael in the same car for hours? _Pass_ , thought Gabriel as Raphael nudged his older siblings toward the table.

The four of them sat down the way people resolving an armed conflict lowered weapons—gradually, and ready to strike if the other party got trigger-happy.

“So, boys,” Gabriel said, willing a smirk to his face, “what’s on the agenda tonight?”

As Raphael began to remove a collection of spreadsheets and maps from his bag, prompting two jeers of “nerd,” an unsteady but familiar ease draped over the table. _Ceasefire_ was an apt description for this meeting. A coffee-shop ceasefire. Against his will, warmth spread through Gabriel’s chest at even the ragged hope of establishing peace.

Gabriel would get through this. _They_ would get through this. If for no other reason than that they had to.

Seven months ago, an angel walked into a bakery.

And he wasn’t walking out again until his family pulled itself together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it's been a wild ride, but I'm happy to call this one done! Hope you all enjoyed.


End file.
